PFI-RP: Scalable Fabrication of Flexible Electronics and Solar Cells with Improved Environmental Stability

University Of Vermont & State Agricultural College, Burlington VT

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercialization potential of this Partnerships for Innovation-Research Partnerships (PFI-RP) project is to enable commercialization of inexpensive, lightweight, and flexible electronic devices with high performance and a long lifetime. The materials developed here will improve the performance of devices across several markets and the process will be compatible with high-throughput manufacturing. This will impact several types of devices with high market potential, enabling displays with lower power consumption and higher brightness, as well as solar cells with extended useful lifetimes. The devices can be thin and semi-transparent for solar windows or for see-through displays, and they can be encapsulated in glass to provide an impermeable hermetic barrier. This PFI will enable the founding of one or more startups in these market spaces, which will in turn lead to employment opportunities and economic development. Moreover, this project will train one postdoctoral researcher and 9 undergraduates with skills in instrumentation development, material deposition, and characterization methods. Students will also receive valuable skills in innovation, entrepreneurship and commercialization through participation in an innovative team-based course. Students from groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields will be particularly recruited to participate in the project. The proposed project addresses the need for large grain-size crystalline semiconductor thin films with greatly improved properties for a wide range of devices. For field-effect transistors, grain size larger than the transistor channel length leads to improved charge carrier mobility, which enables brighter displays. In photovoltaic cells based on hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite materials, large grain size suppresses degradation mechanisms occurring at grain boundaries. Solution-based thin films deposition can deliver these advantages, while also being readily compatible with high-throughput roll-to-roll manufacturing processes. This project takes recent advances in research on deposition from liquid solutions to the next level by scaling up the writing heads and adopting roll-to-roll methods. The anticipated technical results include the construction of a deposition unit that will be used to demonstrate an array of Organic Field Effect Transistors, which will be integrated with Organic Light Emitting Diode pixels to form a simple display. A second unit will be used to demonstrate perovskite photovoltaic cells with improved properties. Long lifetime and improved environmental stability will be achieved through control of thin film properties such as grain size, through the use of thin flexible glass substrates with high hermeticity, and through glass-to-glass bonding by a laser sealing method. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.