Manufacturing of All Inkjet-Printed Organic Photovoltaic Cell Arrays and Evaluating their Suitability for Flexible Electronics

Abstract

The generation of electrical energy depending on renewable sources is rapidly growing and gaining serious attention due to its green sustainability. With fewer adverse impacts on the environment, the sun is considered as a nearly infinite source of renewable energy in the production of electrical energy using photovoltaic devices. On the other end, organic photovoltaic (OPV) is the class of solar cells that offers several advantages such as mechanical flexibility, solution processability, environmental friendliness, and being lightweight. In this research, we demonstrate the manufacturing route for printed OPV device arrays based on conventional architecture and using inkjet printing technology over an industrial platform. Inkjet technology is presently considered to be one of the most matured digital manufacturing technologies because it offers inherent additive nature and last stage customization flexibility (if the main goal is to obtain custom design devices). In this research paper, commercially available electronically functional inks were carefully selected and then implemented to show the importance of compatibility between OPV material stacks and the device architecture. One of the main outcomes of this work is that the manufacturing of the OPV devices was accomplished using inkjet technology in massive numbers ranging up to 1500 containing different device sizes, all of which were deposited on a flexible polymeric film and under normal atmospheric conditions. In this investigation, it was found that with a set of correct functional materials and architecture, a manufacturing yield of more than 85% could be accomplished, which would reflect high manufacturing repeatability, deposition accuracy, and processability of the inkjet technology.

Influence of the thermal annealing on the morphological and structural properties of ZnO films deposited onto polyimide substrates by ink-jet printing

“…For such devices, that is important to obtain high-quality functional elements, for instance, buffer and window films for solar cells; n-type leg for thermoelectric generators; sensitive elements for sensors. For this purpose, ZnO is an important semiconducting material possessing suitable physicochemical properties [7][8][9][10][11]. It should be noted that to carry out 2D printing, there is a need to create functional nanoinks that might be obtained by the formation of printing the suspension of nanomaterials.…”

Photo-Induced Doping in a Graphene Field-Effect Transistor with Inkjet-Printed Organic Semiconducting Molecules

“…Inkjet printing performs accurate positioning of down to picolitre drops of semiconducting organic materials with resolution in about the tens of micrometres [17]. Recently, this technique was used to develop printed products by manufacturing large-area organic electronics with comparable performances to the traditional methods [18]. Nevertheless, ink preparation is still a challenging task and must be tuned to each type of molecule and type of printer in use [19,20].…”

Inkjet Printing of Bioresorbable Materials for Manufacturing Transient Microelectronic Devices

“…In addition, the sheet resistance of printed layers with dimension 5 Â 5 mm 2 and 0.5 μm thickness were measured using the four-point probe measurement method and concluded to vary in the range of 40 AE 5 Ω □ À1 . [4] Furthermore, deposition of an inkjet-printed dielectric layer based on polymeric material typically was found very challenging. The first main reason was the intrinsic electronic property of the addressed materials, and the second being occurrence of the physical irregularities of the printed layer from the deposition process.…”

“…During the past decade, printed electronics has seen its application entering into different sectors, e.g., wearable and stretchable electronics, flexible, and hybrid electronics such as organic photovoltaics, batteries, multilevel sensor and detector applications and conductive interconnects in the industries related to system packaging. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Due to the numerous benefits such as deposition accuracy in micrometer scale, industry relevant up-scalability, and efficient technique of digital processing, the inkjet printing technology is widely recognized as a smart digital fabrication tool for developing microelectronics on various polymeric substrates. [8][9][10][11] Several kinds of flexible electronics have already been manufactured using the inkjet printing technology, e.g., capacitors, thin-film transistors (TFTs), resistors, sensors and detectors, radio frequency antennas, photovoltaics, and so on.…”

“…[ 8–11 ] Several kinds of flexible electronics have already been manufactured using the inkjet printing technology, e.g., capacitors, thin‐film transistors (TFTs), resistors, sensors and detectors, radio frequency antennas, photovoltaics, and so on. [ 4,5,7,9–16 ] All these printed applications are clear evidences to validate the implementation of inkjet technology to deposit fundamental layers with electronic properties, i.e., conductors using nanoparticle or particle‐free‐based metallic or polymeric inks, dielectrics by polymer‐based or hybrid inks with embedded nanoparticles and organic semiconductors (SCs). [ 11,12,17,18 ] Although, the printing of these novel materials has always been a big challenge, but due to the continuously evolving market scenario, it has recently become possible to deposit and postprocess (curing/sintering) these materials with high reliability, thereby, satisfying the electrical demands of devices and circuits, e.g., passive device circuit, filter circuit, and photodetectors.…”