IMEC, Plextronics collaborate on solar materials

“Plextronics’ materials look very promising for high efficiency reproducible organic solar cells,” said Jef Poortmans, program director solar at IMEC, pictured. “With their focus on materials, inks, and process technology for organic solar cells, we expect that our work with Plextronics will help accelerate our optimisation and development of an industrial large area process.” IMEC aims to develop organic multijunction solar cells with efficiency of 10% by 2012. The company’s focus is also on scaling the process to achieve a large area industrial manufacturing technology with an average efficiency of 7% (±0.5%) and solar cell lifetime of five years. Achieveing these goals is said to require high quality, highly reproducible commercial materials. In the first phase, IMEC will investigate Plexcore OS, which is a regioregular poly-3-hexylthiophene (P3HT) polymer with a high absorption coefficient close to the maximum photon flux in the solar spectrum and high mobility. Future research will include evaluation of other Plexcore materials and inks, using deposition techniques such as screen and inkjet printing and spray coating on large area substrates.