Cheap Active Materials for Photovoltaics using Flow Reactor (CAMPFiRe)

Printed solar cells offer the prospect for greatly reduced manufacturing costs compared to conventional silicon technology. Since fabrication costs for printed devices are extremely low, the production costs are dominated by the cost of the constituent materials. Up to half these costs are from the highly-engineered polymer-based semiconductors used to convert light to electricity. Reducing the cost of these active polymers is therefore a critical requirement for successful commercialisation. Current production methods are costly and do not scale well to the large kg-level quantities required by industry. This proposal uses a new approach to their synthesis based on flow chemistry, and aims to build a pilot production line capable of making up to 1 kg of high quality product per day at much lower cost than current methods. The reactor-synthesised polymers will be formulated into inks and used for the print fabrication of low cost organic solar modules.