Injection Molding Plastic Solar Cells.

While organic photovoltaics are accessing specific application sectors taking advantage of their unique properties, it is important to identify as many differentiators as possible to expand the market penetration and consolidation of this technology. In this work, for the first time, the large-scale fabrication of organic photovoltaic modules embedded into structural plastic parts through industrial injection molding is demonstrated. Thermoplastic polyurethane is chosen as the injected material to show that this additional processing step can yield flexible, lightweight photovoltaic modules with enhanced device robustness and virtually unchanged performance.

Large-Area Paper Batteries with Ag and Zn/Ag Screen-Printed Electrodes.

Large-area paper batteries have been explored in this paper, correlating electrode materials and screen printing with the electrochemical performances. The use of office paper embedded in salt solution with two electrodes performed by an easy and large-scale application technique opens doors to a new concept of energy storage. The proposed device is Li-free and uses zinc and silver powder-based screen printable pastes to deposit the electrodes.