The ECN (Energy research Centre of the Netherlands) is teaming up with the Holst Centre to transfer their lab-scale solar cell processing to Roll-to-Roll production:
At ECN, organic photovoltaics are being researched for almost a decade. 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, although an eye will be kept on new high-performance materials. In a first phase the investigated processes will be slot-die coating and gravure printing. Within the ECN labs, efficiencies of over 4% have been obtained. Aim is to at least sustain this level of efficiency when going towards roll-to-roll production.
Being research centres, ECN and Holst Centre will not take any of the technology in production themselves. The open-innovation program aims at industrial parties to subscribe and assign resident researchers to join the research teams on site.
