Scalable manufacturing of solar cells enabled by intense pulsed light

The manufacturing of solar photovoltaic panels has seen dramatic reductions in costs primarily through business innovations to the extent that the industry is quite laige. The implementation of newer technologies that could further reduce costs are very attractive, especially technologies that can be adapted to continuous printing particularly involving polymer film substrate. The Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) technology is well suited to continuous manufacturing platforms such as roll-to-roll due to its very large processing area and rapid processing time scales. The IPL technique delivers high energy pulses of broad spectrum light (UV-Vis-NIR) in a very short duration (ms) over a large processing area (100 cm
²
). In the past few years, the method has found a number of applications within the flexible electronics industry as printed structures for wire traces, transparent conductors and RFID and is now gaining traction within the photovoltaics industry. The IPL technology has been explored for each of the three generations of solar cells. Examples of the IPL processing technique will be detailed for each of the three generation devices: current collecting lines for the market dominant crystalline silicon technology; complimentary processing of electrochemically deposited chalcogenide thin films; and as a rational alternative for the emerging flexible perovskite materials. The most promising opportunity for the IPL within photovoltaics is the application towards the flexible large area roll-to-roll production offered by the solution phase processed perovskites.