Manufacturing equipment provider Coatema Coating Machinery has launched a roll-to-roll product lines for flexible organic, perovskite, and dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) technologies.
The German company's products support working web widths of up to 1,000 mm, as well as a smaller tool for sheet-to-sheet setups.
The largest in this line of PV roll-to-roll products is Click&Coat, a model with working web widths of 300 mm, 500 mm and 1,000 mm. It is designed to be customized with over 30 different process modules, including dryer, laminator, laser process, cutting, and quality control equipment.
For coating alone, there are over 20 modules available, including gravure, doctor blade, slot die coating, rotary screen, curtain coating, and screenprinting. As for drying, the company offers further choices, such as hot air, infrared, UV crosslinking, and jet drying.
The equipment is in use at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, according to Thomas Kolbusch, Coatema's head of marketing and technology. Another example is Organic Electronics Technologies (OET) in Greece where the OPV manufacturer is developing solutions for agrivoltaics, automotive, and building material markets.
OET is participating in a European Union project known as Flex2Energy, which aims to integrate inline laser scribing and quality control systems within the roll-to-roll process, for use in an automated module assembly line built by Spanish machinery company Mondragon Assembly.
Other PV industry customers are located in Brazil, North America, and Europe. “We are seeing perovskite and organic PV manufacturers starting to make products for battery-free internet-of-things applications, for example,” Kolbusch told pv magazine
Looking ahead, Kolbusch sees market opportunities in agrivoltaics. “There is interest in Greece, Spain, and Germany by government agencies in greenhouse applications due to the space-saving benefit and potential to produce food and energy with the same infrastructure. There is a huge potential to add large volumes of solar capacity in areas where there are a lot of greenhouses,” he said.
Flexible PV has features that give it a competitive edge compared to conventional PV for use in greenhouses. “It is lighter, lower cost, easier to install and to keep clean. It also produces electricity over more hours per day, starting and stopping later than conventional solar,” said Kolbusch.
Two smaller roll-to-roll systems are also available from Coatema: the Easycoater for sheet-to-sheet printing in A4 and A0 standard sizes, and the Smartcoater with web widths up to 300 mm, suitable for laboratory or small pilot production.
Coatema, founded in 1974, designs and produces sheet-to-sheet and roll-to-roll equipment for coating, printing and laminating. It has products for the fabrication of batteries, solar PV, medical devices, fuel cells, green hydrogen, and printed electronics.
