flexible solar cells tagged posts

Polymer solar cells manufactured using low-cost roll-to-roll printing technology, demonstrated here by professors Olle Inganäs (right) and Shimelis Admassie. Credit: Stefan Jerrevång/Linkoping university

Polymer solar cells have in recent years emerged as a low cost alternative to silicon solar cells. In order to obtain high efficiency, fullerenes are usually required in polymer solar cells to separate charge carriers. However, fullerenes are unstable under illumination, and form large crystals at high temperatures.

Now, a team of chemists led by Professor Jianhui Hou at the CAS set a new world record for fullerene-free polymer solar cells by developing a unique combination of a polymer called PBDB-T and a small molecule called ITIC...

Flexible OLED light sources on transparent electrodes developed within TREASORES. These OLEDs were made by Fraunhofer FEP using a roll-to-roll process. Credit: Fraunhofer FEP

In >3yrs of work, European scientists have finally made future lighting technology ready to market. They developed flexible lighting foils that can be produced roll-to-roll. These devices pave the path towards cheaper solar cells and LED lighting panels. Project TREASORES was lead by Empa scientist Frank Nüesch and combined knowhow from 9 companies and 6 research institutes in 5 european countries.

In Nov 2012, the TREASORES project (Transparent Electrodes for Large Area Large Scale Production of Organic Optoelectronic Devices) started with the aim of developing technologies to dramatically reduce the production cost...