Coating, Degrading and Testing of Organic Polymer Devices - Reducing the route from Laboratory to Production scale devices

Organic electronics is a vast and fast improving research area, with widespread uses proposed since the 1991 discovery of semiconducting polymers. The premise of this thesis is based on finding more effective ways towards making cheap organic electronics and enabling a shorter path from the lab scale manufacturing of organic electronics to the large scale manufacturing, by downscaling some of the methods used in full size roll to roll (R2R) coating techniques into a lab scale setting. The enabling of similar techniques in both lab and production settings allows an optimization in the lab to be more directly transferred to the production environment, in contrast to the presently often used spin coating technique, for which optimizations of parameters are close to impossible to transfer to the larger scale operations. Therefore a mini lab scale roll coating system was developed to enable lab scale fabrication of organic electronic devices, using the techniques of the larger R2R systems. The lab scale slot-die roll coating technique reported, not only allow a faster route from lab scale to production scale, but also has the added advantage of a smaller material consumption. The solution volume, which for spin coating allowed making a single 1 cm2 device, using the mini roll coater (MRC) enable the coating of a 100 cm2 area, resulting in 60 1cm2 devices with the present mask designs. With the relative expensive polymers, this translates into a large saving for performing the same amount of tests, not to mention the saved time in the preparation of the devices. The lab scale roll coater system was used to manufacture a range of solar cells from different polymers, testing the influence of thicknesses, and post treatment processes. It was used to fabricate tandem solar cells with several thousand cells manufactured in the process for creating a recipe that would allow a wet processed layer on layer coating to function without having penetration and dissolution through the up to 12 separately printed layers. Testing and analysis of a nanoparticle based method with water used as the transport agent for the active layer inks in solar cells was conducted, with a primary focus on testing the morphology of the nanoparticles. This type of ink could allow a more environmentally friendly production of solar cells, due to a lower use of organic solvents, while further allowing a new level of control for the active layer morphology. Besides solar cells, the lab scale coating method was applied to both electrochromic devices and light emitting electrochemical cells. In these cases relatively large devices could be manufactured, without the use of protective atmospheres and without using evaporated electrode materials. The performance of the devices was lower than the state of the art, however this was to be expected due to the proof of concept manufacturing. Finally a section has been included on the use of an open source electronic platform with a dedicated sourcemeter board developed to test solar cell devices without the need of expensive multipurpose source meters. This also shows the potential for stand-alone test, especially relevant for the various outdoor test conducted around the world and for the logging of various high-impact parameters, such as temperature, humidity and solar insolation.