Preparing for transition to large scale manufacturing

Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN) and Holst Centre have signed an agreement to offer a joint research programme on Roll-to-Roll organic photovoltaics to the industry.

ECN, which has been doing research on organic photovoltaics for almost 10 years, says the knowledge of materials, system designs and production processes has come to a point where transition to large scale manufacturing has to be envisaged.

At Holst Centre, the recently opened Roll-to-Roll research line for printed electronics will be used to complement the knowledge of ECN and support the further research towards low-cost, large-area manufacturing. To guarantee the low-cost potential, the upscaling will initially be done with active materials that are abundantly available. At the same time, the focus will also be on spotting new high-performance materials.

In a first phase the investigated processes will be slot-dye coating and gravure printing.

Within the ECN labs, efficiencies of over 4% have been obtained. The aim is to at least sustain this level of efficiency when going towards roll-to-roll production, shared ECN.

Holst Centre is an independent open-innovation R&D centre, which was set up in 2005 by IMEC (Flanders, Belgium) and TNO (The Netherlands) with support from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Government of Flanders. The open-innovation programme aims at industrial parties to subscribe and assign resident researchers to join the research teams on site. A free non-exclusive license on the generated IP is given to all partners participating in the programme.