Opvius has announced they have developed a novel production process that can create customised OPV modules in a wide range of colours and shapes.
Opvius believes this offering will be the key to the successful development and manufacturing of solar-active semi-finished sheets for a wide number of industrial products to which an energy-generating surface can been added.
Normally, in many industry settings, the preparation of a customised offerings results in high costs and low volumes. This is not the case with customised OPV modules from Opvius.
Opvius's production technology - is based on a combination of coating, print and laser processes - allows a comparatively simple adaptation of customer requirements without any significant impact on volumes or costs structure. The new process allows further far-reaching possibilities in OPV freeform production.
In classic OPV production, the shape of the final product is determined already in the first step of production. In the newly-developed process, all structure-forming steps are performed after the substrate sheets have been coated.
The new process will be applied first to the prototype line of Opvius GmbH. The broad introduction of the <P1-Star> process is planned by the end of 2018.
"What sets the OPVIUS production process apart is, last but not least, the application of developed finishing processes such as in the printing industry, combined with the type of finishing strategy used in automobile construction. By means of our technology building blocks we produce as many varied products as possible, all of which involve as many identical, partly adjusted, processing steps."
"Looking at this from the angle of finishing technology, the biggest challenge is to leave the changeover from uniform finishing to customised finishing as late as possible in the production process. The new process has allowed us to move the split-up into individual variants until the end of the frontend process. From the point of view of production logistics, this is a milestone."
Tobias Sauermann, Director of Production at Opvius
"Our new structuring process, called <P1-Star>, results in far-reaching changes: In principle, it is now possible to produce an OPV base role, from which, for instance, products can be adapted to customer requirements on the one hand, and on the other hand a major part of production can now take place without minute attention to dimensions, because all the structures are only included at the end of the process."
"Thus, we can minimise all the effects of the preceding process steps. This simplifies the process and has a positive effect on the performance param eters of our products."
Mr. Sri Subramaniam, process expert at Opvius