Bosch and Innovia Films in talks to join next phase of Australian OPV project

Sara Ver-Bruggen - 11 Feb 2010

Bosch and Innovia Films are intending to join a follow-up to Australia's largest academic and industrial collaboration on organic solar cells.

The three-year Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC) initiative is set to complete in June 2010 and the project partners are finalising a business plan to submit to the Victoria government to secure new funding for a project to further develop organic solar cell technologies for commercial application.

VICOSC partners include Melbourne and Monash universities, Commonwealth and Scientific Research Institute (CSIRO), Securency, Merck and BlueScope Steel, Australia's largest supplier of steel roofing.

UK-based Innovia Films and Germany-headquartered Bosch are in talks with the VICOSC partners to join the follow-up project which would start no earlier than July 2010.

Executives from Bosch's Singapore office have been engaged in talks with the VICOSC team. Bosch chose Singapore for its Asia R&D hub because of its central location in the region and to exploit R&D in renewable energy technologies, including organic solar cells.

R&D

Prior to establishing a Singapore team in September 2008, a Bosch delegation travelled around parts of Asia-Pacific to better understand R&D projects the company could potentially become involved with, such as VICOSC. Aspects of R&D within the project fit well with other OPV investments Bosch has made closer to home. VICOSC academic Andrew Holmes, who is based at Melbourne University, has links with a research group at the University of Ulm in Germany. The Ulm group is responsible for some of the work being commercialised by Dresden-based OPV start-up Heliatek, which Bosch invested in three years ago.

Innovia Films, which produces substrates for packaging and other markets, set up Securency with the Reserve back of Australia - the country's central bank - in 1996. The joint venture is behind the polymer-based banknotes used in Australian and other currencies.

For their follow-up project the partners of VICOSC will need about AUS$10 million (€6.5 million). Both Bosch and Innovia Films are keen to keep a watching brief on VICOSC's progress and, as partners, they may provide some funding too.

Since starting in March 2007 the VICOSC project has been working with several types of third generation solar cell materials including vacuum procressable and printable small molecule, some polymer-based materials and some dye sensitised solar cell materials. The follow-up project will continue to identify materials and processes best able to yield organic solar cells with good efficiencies and durability. Thye will most likely be printable in order to keep production costs down. The group sees building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) as the biggest market for the OPV technology it is developing.

More print trials will take place between now and the close of VICOSC to test the OPV materials and structures being developed.