Performance investigation of organic photovoltaic layers on architectural membrane

Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) is a promising alternative to established crystalline silicon technologies due to its expected easy fabrication and low capital cost investments. Current OPV are typically manufactured by depositing active materials on plastic substrates like Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or Polyethylene naphthalate (PEN). In spite of the low cost and easy availability of these materials, their inferior performance when compared with architectural membrane materials like Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) and Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) limits their future application in contemporary architectural context. Moreover, different layers of the organic Photovoltaic composite will exhibit distinct responses upon external loads due to their various material properties. Therefore it is important to find out the weakness, its failure mechanism and how this will influence the OPV???s performance out from the different printed OPV layers. This research investigated both the electrical and mechanical properties of Ag based electrodes and charge carrier transporting layer printed on architectural membrane materials, by employing the uniaxial test methodology coupled with electrical characterization. The results report the performance differences of the tested layers as printed on either PET or ETFE. The property features revealed by this survey also provide valuable knowledge for future realization of mechanically robust printed OPV in large scale on architectural membranes.