Gravure Printed Organic Photovoltaic Modules Onto Flexible Substrates Consisting of a P3HT:PCBM Photoactive Blend1. (2016) - Kapnopoulos, C.
Abstract: A novel approach for the fabrication of flexible organic photovoltaic (OPV) modules with an inverted architecture by gravure printing process is presented. The printing has been carried out using a sheet-to-sheet (S2S) lab scale proofer, while all the printing steps were performed in ambient conditions and optimized for each of the OPV layers. Commercially available Zinc Oxide (ZnO) ink was used as the electron transport (ETL) layer, poly(3-hexylthiophene):[6, 6]-phenyl C61 butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT:PCBM) blend comprised the bulk heterojunction (BHJ) photoactive layer, poly-3, 4-ethylenedioxy-thiophene:poly(styrenesulfonic-acid) (PEDOT:PSS) was used as the hole transport layer (HTL), and silver (Ag) nanoparticle (NP) ink was used as the top contact electrode. The four OPV layers have been successively printed on indium tin oxide (ITO) coated polyethylene terephthalate (PET) flexible substrate using the same printing parameters. The OPV modules have size of 45 cm 2 with an active area of 8 cm 2 composed of 8 interconnected cells and exhibited a maximum power conversion efficiency (PCE) of over 2%. The printing parameters were optimized by the contribution of extensive morphological characterization by scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM, TEM), as well as from Spectroscopic Ellipsometry (SE) for the determination of the printed layers thickness, optical properties and photoactive layer blend morphology. The above approach reveals the required printing parameters for large-scale manufacturing of flexible OPVs by a R2R process.