Implementation of Manufacturing of an Organic Transparent Thin Film Conductor for Flexible Solar Cells

The U.S. Department of Defense needs a new generation of photovolotaic (PV) arrays that are economic to make, flexible, rugged, and can be supported on a variety of substrates, including thin plastic sheets and fabrics. Transparent, highly conducting materials are needed to replace the brittle and expensive tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) used as the transparent electrode in most current PV cells and enable the fabrication of truly flexible solar cells and other electronic devices. During Phase I, TDA Research, Inc. (TDA) has developed a reproducible method to make conducting polymers that can be spin-coated from non-corrosive organic solutions on a variety of flexible substrates to produce highly transparent thin films of low surface resistance. During this SBIR Phase II project TDA will further optimizae the properties of its transparent conductor, streamline its manufacture, and assess its performance in organic photovoltaic (OPV) prototypes. If results are promising we will fabricate an OPV prototype entirely under ambient conditions.