The FlexTech Alliance, a collaborative effort of private industry and the US Army Research Laboratory, has allotted a $450,000 contract to Solarmer Energy.
The plastic solar panel developer will design and synthesise high efficiency donor polymer materials for the OPV sector.
Solarmer’s vice president of technology development, Gang Li, mentioned that the company plans to demonstrate high performance OPVs with efficiency up to 8% for lab scale cells, and up to 6% efficiency for 6 x 6 square inch solar panels. Currently, the current state of the art efficiency for OPVs is ~6.8% for lab scale cells and 3.9% module efficiency for 6 x 6 square inch modules.
Efficiency of OPVs is low compared to other solar cells. However, The Alliance is confident that Solarmer’s development work will enable the industry to address this challenge in order to deliver the necessary higher efficiency devices.
Mike Idacavage, principal research fellow at Cytec Industries and a member of FlexTech’s Technical Council, said that the technical approach for this project builds on a design to synthesise new active layer materials that can be used in polymer solar cells.
This new generation of active materials is targeted to deliver improved key properties, “such as a low band gap, appropriate molecular energy levels, good mobility, and excellent processability,” added Idacavage.
Solarmer was founded in 2006 to commercialise this technology, which was developed by Professor Yang Yang at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. The company has licensed this technology from UCLA and additional technology developed by Professor Luping Yu at the University of Chicago.
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