Organic Photovoltaic Materials Charge Up Portable Electronics

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Organic Photovoltaic Materials Charge up Portable Electronics This article is based off the NanoMarkets report Organic Photovoltaic Markets

Over the last decade, portable electronic devices such as mobile phones, mp3 players, PDAs and laptop computers have proliferated at a spectacular rate. Compact rechargeable batteries have been fundamental to the success of these products. So have increasingly powerful microchips, whose capacity has continued to observe the exponential growth described by Moore’s Law. Unfortunately, the energy density of batteries has not. Clever engineers have been able to maintain an acceptable time between charges by using power management software, new power-management chips, and more energy-efficient components, but such tweaks can only achieve so much. If portable electronics are to become still more powerful, consumers will either have to plug into the grid more often, or product designers will have to enable access to a more convenient source of energy. And what could be more accessible than light? Efficient solar cells, drawing on sunlight or even artificial light, could extend the time between charges, perhaps even indefinitely. The idea isn’t new. Solar powered calculators have been available for decades. They require little power, however, and energy hogs like mobile phones present a more difficult problem. An emerging technology, thin-film organic photovoltaics (OPVs) and dye-sensitized cells (DSCs) may be the solution. A host of companies is busily developing materials and intellectual property to establish themselves in this new market, from chemical giants such as BASF to highly focused start-ups such as Konarka and Plextronics. Organic Photovoltaic Markets, a recent study by NanoMarkets, looks at the activities of these and many other companies to estimate the opportunity represented by these technologies.

Cheap, flexible and responsive Scientists have known since 1906 that organic materials can turn light into electricity, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that researchers began using common organic dyes such as chlorophyll and methylene blue in photovoltaic devices. In the 1980s, work with polymers such as poly(sulfur nitride) began, and by 1986, a scientist at Eastman Kodak had made the breakthrough discovery that combining donor and acceptor materials in a single cell dramatically improved efficiency. In the last two decades, new materials and more sophisticated architectures have advanced OPVs to the point that efficiencies exceeding 6 percent have been achieved, and 8-10 percent is likely within the next few years. Even more efficient are DSCs, hybrids that combine

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organometallic dyes and mesoporous inorganic oxides. Discovered in 1991, these devices have achieved efficiencies as high as 11 percent. The efficiency of OPVs and DSCs compares poorly with silicon photovoltaics, which offer efficiencies over 20 percent, but other advantages, particularly low cost, flexibility and performance in low or variable light, make them competitive for a range of niche applications extending beyond portable electronics to building-integrated systems, signage, packaging and smart fabrics. Organic photovoltaics are relatively cheap to fabricate using inexpensive, well-understood coating processes such as inkjet printing or spin coating on large, flexible substrates such as plastic. The flexible product is light, easy to install and versatile—for example, it might be rolled up for storage. And the nature of the photoactive materials themselves means OPVs and DSCs perform well in dim or variable light, unlike silicon. Each of these characteristics is well suited to portable electronics. Being inexpensive, the new capability would not add prohibitively to the cost of the device, be it a mobile phone, mp3 player, laptop or another consumer device. Given their physical properties, the cells could be either laminated to the case or embedded in a flexible peripheral. The responsiveness of the cells would allow them to charge even indoors, an important consideration since portable electronics are not typically exposed to sunlight. Benefits of DSC and OPV Cells Efficiency Main Benef its

Main disadv antages Future impact

Dye Sensitized Cells (DSC) 10.4 percent efficiency (liquid BHJ) Offers the lowest cost of all printed PV cells Lightweight and flexible Enable R2R and standard printing Commercially av ailable since 2007 f rom G24i Degradation under heat and UV light, cell casing is difficult to seal due to solv ents, corrosion Printable on large areas Efficiencies up to 15 percent Solid f lexible DSCs

Organic PV (OPV) 5.2 percent (solid BHJ) Low cost f abrication of large area dev ices Lightweight, flexible and tunable Enable R2R and fast standard printing Lif etime of 3 to 5 y ears Enabler f or applications where mechanical f lexibility and disposability are v alued Not commercially available (Konarka plans f or late 2008) Material instability ov er long term Printable on large areas Stability f or 10-20 years 10 percent efficiency with single junction, and up to 20 percent with multiple junctions

Source: NanoMarkets, LC

Early days Several products are already on the market. For example, U.K.-based G24i is commercializing DSC-based phone chargers in Africa and India, where they can provide a more reliable primary or back-up power source than the grids. Called Gcell Flex, they are able to supply up to 20 minutes of talk time for every hour of charging. G24i has been able to reduce the cost of the

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product by a factor of five in the last two years, to just $20, and the company has invested $120 million in a Wales manufacturing facility. “G24i is targeting the emerging markets of Africa and India, unlike its main competitor Konarka, because G24i understand that mobile phone usage in Africa is set to explode from 600m handsets to 2 billion by 2015,” says Philip Drachman, author of the NanoMarkets study. Konarka, a Lowell, Massachusetts-based spinout from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, is supplying the U.S. Army with solar-powered battery chargers based on its OPV-based Power Plastic, which can be flexed to a 2-inch diameter. Konarka is also working with Toppan Forms, a Tokyo printing and information management firm, on the commercialization of Power Plastic within the sophisticated Japanese electronics market. Toppan brings well-developed roll-to-roll printing processes to the project. A partnership with SKYShades, announced earlier this year, could lead to the commercialization of canopies and other tension membrane fabric structures incorporating Power Plastic. OPV-Based Power Plastic

Source: Konarka Technologies, Inc.

An IP powerhouse, Konarka has attracted over $100 million in venture capital and equity funding. Its chief scientist is Alan Heeger, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on conductive polymers. In October 2008, the firm announced the opening of “the world’s largest” roll-to-roll thin-film photovoltaic manufacturing facility in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “This facility has state-of-the-art printing capabilities that are ready for full operation, with the future potential to produce over a gigawatt of flexible plastic solar modules per year,” says Howard Berke, executive chairman and co-founder of Konarka. The output of the facility, which has a capacity exceeding 10 million square meters of material per year, will be used for indoor, portable, outdoor and building-integrated applications—essentially the entire range of applications suited to organic photovoltaics.

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A spinout from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg-based Plextronics, is centered on a portfolio of tunable conductive, semi-conductive and photoactive inks and materials called Plexcore. Since 2002, the firm has raised over $40 million from investors including Applied Materials and Solvay. Like Konarka, Plextronics has tapped into the defense market, and it has a three-year, $14 million agreement to work with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to research and produce printed electronic products for military applications signed in 2007. More recently, the firm announced plans to create a research and development center for organic photovoltaic process development outside Seoul with Korea Parts & Fasteners. And in September 2008, Plextronics and IMEC, an independent nanoelectronics research institute located in Belgium, agreed to collaborate on the development of a reproducible process for high-efficiency organic solar cells using Plexcore materials and inks. IMEC intends to develop OPV cells with an efficiency of 10 percent by 2012. “Both collaborations allow us to learn how our material sets perform in different processes and structures to ensure that our material and inks are robust for high-volume manufacturing,” says Jim Dietz, vice president of business development Plextronics. “Our collaboration with IMEC relates to testing our materials in IMEC’s devices,” Dietz says. “While there is no doubt that advances in device design will help boost OPV efficiencies, we think that, at this point, there are more meaningful gains to be had related to materials improvements,” he says. “Plextronics’ holistic focus on designing and synthesizing new p- and ntype semiconductors and conductive polymers, formulating such polymers into ink systems, perfecting the use of these inks in basic and advanced devices, has been part of our success in demonstrating a 5.98 percent NRE certified test cell in a relatively short time.” Emerging opportunity Penetration into existing and new PV markets will depend on four factors, according to NanoMarkets: costs, not only in $/Wp but also $/m2 of product and power availability (kWh/Wp/annum); technical and environmental profile; added value for the consumer and architects; and ease of production at economical scales. To predict how its own photovoltaic inks and technology would scale in high-volume manufacturing, Plextronics has worked with its partners to develop a simulation model. “Based upon this model, we clearly demonstrate to our customers the pathway to sub $1/Wp costs,” says Dietz. “We are driving our OPV research around the critical factors that affect manufacturing costs.” The company’s customers consider opportunities for off-grid and consumer applications as first entry points given the lower efficiency required, he states. “At 10 percent efficiencies, we think that customers will begin to consider certain on-grid applications.”

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NanoMarkets is cautious in his projections for the technology. “OPV and DSC technologies are so far behind on the conversion-efficiency curve when compared to conventional PV that they can succeed only in markets where their substrate flexibility and ability to perform in dim or variable light give them a competitive advantage,” Drachman says. Silicon is a reliable and mature technology, he notes. “It will take quite some time for OPV cells to enter silicon PV’s market space.” There are, meanwhile, several viable market niches, he says. They include applications where there is adequate space to install the photovoltaic panels; areas where there is abundant sunlight for generating large amounts of energy; and novel applications unavailable to bulky conventional photovoltaics—such as battery chargers. NanoMarkets projects that the worldwide market for OPV- and DSC-based photovoltaics will total about $54 million in 2009. By 2012, the figure could climb to $276 million, and by 2015 reach $915 million. Worldwide Markets for OPV and DSC-based PV 1000 900

$ Millions

800 700 600

OPV

500

DSC

400 300 200 100 0 2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

Source: Na noMarkets, LC (Organic Photovoltaic Markets, May 2008)

It is hard not to be impressed with the visions of such companies as Konarka for organic PV charging batteries for the energy-hungry consumer electronics devices; however, this is still a vision and compelling business cases have yet to emerge for these applications either on the demand or supply side, NanoMarkets says. For additional information about NanoMarkets and its full listing of reports and services please visit us on the web at www.nanomarkets.net or emailing us at sales ” at”nanomarkets.net.

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