Innovation Lab HySPRINT

The last piece of puzzle completes the perovskite lab

18.02.2019

Slot-die coating machine implemented into the HySPRINT perovskite lab © Mariia A., HySPRINT

In January 2019 the HySPRINT perovskite lab received the last missing machine - a slot-die coater - and is now fully equipped. The unique nature of the slot-die coater setup is that experiments are done in a nitrogen-purged glove box in which humidity and oxygen levels are kept below 0.1 ppm. We also operate an additional smaller slot-die coater placed in an ambient environment for initial testing and optimization.

This new coater is a part of the HySPRINT perovskite deposition glovebox cluster. This cluster enables the complete production chain from mixing inks and solutions to spin-coating, inkjet printing, slot-die coating or thermal evaporation of perovskites to measuring solar cell devices in an inert atmosphere. The users of HySPRINT perovskite lab have today an access to all the machines in one-lab space, which simplifies the process of fabrication and optimization of perovskite-based photovoltaics. “Now our international team of scientists will start to develop the ink for slot die coating and work on achieving the high-quality perovskite thin films for large area photovoltaic (PV) applications”, says Dr. Florian Mathies one of the active users of the lab working in the Young Investigator Group led by Dr. Eva Unger.

The process of the slot die coating deposition. A standard printer ink was used for demonstration © Mariia A., HySPRINT

The processing via slot-die coating is more advantageous for the mass production of perovskite films as compared, for instance, to the widely used spin coating that wastes up to 90% of the solution and is limited to the small substrates. Slot die coating is an industrial friendly scalable technique that enables to increase the production speeds, obtains greater coat weight uniformity and substantially reduces the wasting – here the ink is completely utilized.

The slot-die coating offers several optimization parameters such as the substrate to die head distance, substrate temperature, and shear speed that will enable the scientists to produce perovskite thin films with a wide range of thickness and grain size. The initial baseline experiments are focused on PV applications that can be expanded to the wider range of tasks including fabrication of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), field effect transistors (FETs), and photosensors.

Working in a strong collaborative environment, we are eager to provide the facilities of all HySPRINT labs to the industrial partners and evaluate innovative ideas together. Please do not hesitate to get in contact with us.

Mariia A.

Feb. 2019