Project acronym: SELFLEX
 Contract No.: TREN/07/FP6EN/S07.70666/038681 SELFLEX
 Contract Type: Specific Targeted Research Project
 Start date: 2007-06-01
 End date: 2010-05-31 (duration 36 months)
 Project cost: 1.70 M€
 Project funding: 0.70 M€

Whilst many achievements have been made over the last decades, costs of PV cells are still the main obstacle for increased utilisation of electric power provided by this clean and renewable technology. In order to become competitive, new improved solar cell concepts and cost-effective manufacturing solutions have to be developed to facilitate further growth of the sector.

The overall objective of the project is to demonstrate at industrial scale cost-effective crystalline Si PV cells manufacturing technology based on highly innovative manufacturing concept – self-formation. The fundamental principle of self-formation, having much in common with growth processes found in living nature, is generation of structural growth processes through interaction of chaotic and structured media. Self-formation manufacturing concept is based on the selected groups of planar bottom-up processes (so called self-formation processes) able to specifically form the structure of object. Generation of self-formation based manufacturing protocols enables optimisation of technology in cost-effective means.

 Project main scientific and technological objectives are:

• To demonstrate the validity and flexibility of proposed technological solution by performing manufacturing runs under strict quality management, manufacturing Demo solar cells and assessing SELFLEX technology against industrially available solar cell manufacturing technologies;
• To perform socio-economic research into the interface between the novel manufacturing concept - self-formation - and solar cell manufacturing market identifying and evaluating target niches and possible non-technical obstacles for the penetration into photovoltaic markets.

Project flyer 2 (2009)

Project flyer 1 (2008)