Volume production of customized organic photovoltaics

摘要

To realize power generation everywhere, customers and designers are eager for PV solutions offering total design freedom for seamless integration into everyday life. This trend becomes even more important if the 'mega city' development is taken into account: more and more people will live in city environments in the future while classical PV technologies do not offer proper solutions for this context. Accordingly, the next wave of renewable energies will not be standalone products like today but will rather be a kind of integrated functionality. Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) already broaden applications as they are manufactured on polymer foil where the final product is thin, flexible and semi-transparent. However, OPV modules are commonly printed/coated in form of stripes that limits their design layout and integration. Therefore, the current state of the OPV manufacturing process needs to be modified to allow fabrication of free patterns and fully customized devices. In this contribution we present the approach pioneered by OPVIUS in the evolution of OPV towards customization in large volumes to meet customer expectations. Starting with modifications on the slot-die, we also describe advances in patterning and printing technologies that allow realization of free shapes on devices. For the first time we also present a three-dimensional (3D) OPV module produced using mass production techniques.