I’m building a solar panel for my science fair project and it has to be high school level. On ebay they have solar cells that say they are tabbed and ones that say they are untabbed. If I buy ones that are untabbed how do i “tab” them?
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One has a means of attaching leads, or has leads for your electrical connection and the other you have to fabricate a means of making a connection to your cell’s conductive strips.
Depending on the amount of current the cell is to produce at peak will be your limiting factor, but something as simple as conductive tape (adhesive RF shielding for example) can work. Securing it could be done if you install them in a rabbeted frame to accept the panel and locate your conductive foil at each pole of the cell. Then a simple matter of securing a brass screw through that conductive tape with a simple wire loop under the head of the screw makes for a simple secure connection. While you could try to attach wire with a low wattage soldering iron, there are some instances where the cell could be damaged from the heat application.
Since it sounds like your cells will not be weather resistant, you will need to make a weather resistant frame for them, which makes the above a very simple method of attachment. .
It boils down to how much you like to solder. Or how cheap you are, you save money by doing your own soldering. Here is a great explanation from the site below:
Untabbed solar cells are simply cells which haven’t been tabbed. Tabbing is simply a process where two little strips of flat wire are attached to the face of each cell. Untabbed solar cells are cheaper, but the downside is that you need to tab them yourself. This isn’t a very complicated task and as long as you prepare all the parts for the tabbing process doesn’t take very long either. Preparing for the tabbing process means that you’ll need to put some flux on the cell and tin the tabbing wire before soldering it to the face of the cell. It adds about 2 hours to the build time of a solar panel and I recommend it after you’ve built at least one panel.
Tabbed solar cells have already had the two little pieces of wire soldered onto them. This makes building much faster because you can jump right in and string the cells together. These cells are usually 30% more than their untabbed counterpart, but even building panels with these cells still saves you around 60% over buying the same output solar panel (even used).
If you’re just starting out wanting to build a solar panel I recommend you get some tabbed solar cells first. It will make your life a lot easier and you’ll learn everything about building solar panels except tabbing them. If you’re a little bit adventurous than you can go with the untabbed cells, but make sure not to drink any coffee before tabbing them! I learned the hard way by ruining a couple cells because my hand was really shaking.