Panasonic's Amorton family has a special program for indoor use. These amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin-film technology solar cells are sensitive to mainly visible light. This roughly parallels the sensitivity curve of the human eye.
Indoor lighting such as LED, fluorescent lamps are also in that area, while incident (filtered) daylight is also largely there.
Unfiltered sunlight outdoors, still has a lot of energy in the higher spectrum, which is appropriate for the sensitivity curve of crystalline panels (c-Si).
Amroton a-Si cells provide 0.63V per cell with up to 17.0 μA/cm2 corresponding to 7.3 μW/cm2. The standard program consists of a-Si cells evaporated on a glass substrate. There are 19 versions in 5 voltage variants from 1.9-5.0Voc, with powers of 8.8μWp
up to 0.28mWp. The dimensions range from 15x15x0.7mm to 97x57x1.1mm.
On customer specification, instead of the common glass substrate, a flexible plastic can also be used as a base in order to have a bendable assembly and even stainless steel which is unbreakable.
The application:
- stand-alone power supply
- as support, in combination with primary batteries
- to charge a battery
Typical application areas are indoor IOT sensors, powering handheld electronics. The a-Si modules can also be used as light detectors because their sensitivity matches the human eye.
