Let's roll: Material for polymer solar cells may lend itself to large-area processing

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For all the promise they have shown in the lab, polymer solar cells still need to "get on a roll" like the ones employed in printing newspapers so that large sheets of acceptably efficient photovoltaic devices can be manufactured continuously and economically. Polymer solar cells offer advantages over their traditional silicon-based counterparts in numerous ways, including lower cost, potentially smaller carbon footprint and a greater variety of uses.

For all the promise they have shown in the lab, polymer solar cells still need to "get on a roll" like the ones employed in printing newspapers so that large sheets of acceptably efficient photovoltaic devices can be manufactured continuously and economically. Polymer solar cells offer advantages over their traditional silicon-based counterparts in numerous ways, including lower cost, potentially smaller carbon footprint and a greater variety of uses.

New research results reported by an international team led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) indicate that the "sweet spot" for mass-producing polymer solar cells--a tantalizing prospect for decades--may be far larger than dictated by the conventional wisdom. In experiments using a mock-up of a high-volume, roll-to-roll processing method, the researchers produced polymer-based solar cells with a "power conversion efficiency" of better than 9.5 percent, just shy of the minimum commercial target of 10 percent.

That's almost as good as the small-batch devices made in the lab with spin-coating, a method that produces high-quality films in the laboratory but is commercially impractical since it wastes up to 90 percent of the initial ink.

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Image via National Institute of Standards and Technology