About a decade ago, the field of organic photovoltaics (OPV) looked like one of the most promising opportunities for printed electronics. However, OPV technology never was able to achieve its promise, let alone efficiencies and lifetimes needed by the market, and most of the early technologies went out of business.
 
Heliatek is the lone exception from this initial group. A 2006 spinoff from the Technical University of Dresden (IAPP) and the University of Ulm, Heliatek has steadily improved the performance of its solar modules, reaching a record conversion efficiency of 13.2% for an OPV multi-junction cell, and is now heading into large-scale manufacturing.
 
Dr. Thomas Bickl, Heliatek’s VP sales and product development, said that the path carved out by founder and current CTO Martin Pfeiffer has helped to ensure the company’s viability.
 
“We just had our 10th anniversary, and we have grown a lot,” Dr. Bickl said. “I would say there were three different time periods for our company. From 2006-2012, we were a start-up consisting of a few R&D people. We got some seed funding and were working on fundamental research in a small lab.
 
“In 2012, we started a C round, where we knew we had to get out of the lab and show that we had something real,” he added. “The money we raised allowed us to build a small pilot line. From 2012-14, it was more on the operational side. we built the pilot line and got it running. Still there was a lot of R&D so the customer was not in the picture yet.”
 
By 2015, Heliatek was ready to work with customers on specific projects and tests. Heliatek has implemented projects with numerous industry leaders, including Kandil Steel, AGC Glass Europe and SVK, a leading manufacturer of fiber cement.
 
“In 2015, we built our customer oriented team of product development sales and marketing people,” said Dr. Bickl. “Now we are doing pilot projects with glass people, metal people, and concrete people, and we are gathering global data on these materials.”
 
In September 2016, Heliatek achieved an €80 million ($88 million) financing round, with the goal of expanding its annual HeliaFilm manufacturing capacity by one million square meters.
 
“We have obtained D scale round so we can build large scale manufacturing, as the small pilot line will never be profitable,” Dr. Bickl noted. “In our technology, size matters, and the larger we are, the less expensive production will be.”
 
One key is to maintain efficiencies achieved on the pilot line into full-scale production.
 
“We are achieving 7%. It will be a challenge to maintain our efficiency on the large manufacturing line, but what we have seen so far is about 1% to 1.5% from the lab tool to the production tool,” he noted. “When we go to the double stack in our next production tool, we will definitely be double digit at 10%, and with the learning curve, could get to 11% or 12%. This is something that is not blue sky, but is real stuff that we do every day.”
 
Dr. Bickl said that achieving the lifetimes that its partners are seeking is more of a challenge, particularly in developing barrier films that eliminate moisture.
 
“I see bigger challenges in lifetimes,” he noted. “Basically, we need to create a flexible film in such a way that no water penetration is happening. What you can buy today on the market is expensive and doesn’t really fit our expectations. We have teamed up with an R&D funded project to develop a new kind of barrier film that can be manufactured much cheaper and has a factor of 10x better performance than anything that you can buy today.
 
“A lot of our future success will be tied to a good barrier film technology” Dr. Bickl added. We also need the film industry to be able to scale up this film technology.”
 
The idea that the HerliaFilm has to last forever is actually not the case.
 
“It makes a lot of sense for facades to last forever, but our customers tell us that 20 years we have in mind are really ok at 80%,” Dr. Bickl observed. “What is more important for facade people is that the film ages at the same rate, so the color doesn’t change. People look at color differences.”
 
As an example, he noted that the solar boom in Germany started quite early, and solar roofs installed in 2000 are being repowered.
 
“After 15 years, people change the solar panels because the efficiency is now doubled,” he noted. “The important thing is to design the films so they can be replaced with new ones that generate more power. It should not be bonded on forever. This had to be put into the product design.”
 
To scale up production, Heliatek had to design its own equipment.
 
“The large-scale production facility will be operational by mid-2018,” Dr. Bickl said. “We are ordering the equipment now, and we speak with equipment suppliers on how to build the machinery for us. We keep a lot of the know-how to ourselves.  We own the molecule, so even if someone had the equipment, they would have to come to us.
 
“While we build up the factory we are running our pilot line tool to design new facade solutions and testing our materials,” he added. “The new tool can produce one million square feet per year, and that is a drop in the ocean to our partner companies. We have 20 partner companies, and they are all selling more than that every year. They want to see how the technology does in the market.”
 
Dr. Bickl is optimistic that when people see what HeliaFilm can do, there will be tremendous demand for the solar cells.
 
“The construction industry is a very conservative industry, and you have to over come some conceptual hurdles,” said Dr. Bickl. “Construction people don’t usually deal with electricity, but HeliaFilm is easy to install. The reason our partner companies are doing this is that all of these facade elements today are in the commodity market, and by adding HeliaFilm, you create a different value for their customers.  A facade company usually only has one contact with the customer, and that is when it is installing it. If you maintain a maintenance contract for solar, then when the customer is building another building, they will remember you.
 
“This fab is just the beginning,” he added. “Once the market gets the appetite it will change to a a pull market and our challenge will be to build more factories.”