Q3 News: SimOEP'20 Review, New Papers & How Litos Lite was developed.
/Welcome to the Fluxim Q3/2020 newsletter,
As we head towards the end of the year (and what a year it has been) we wanted to take a stock of the last few months and highlight some of the positive research news and events you might be interested in reading about. Here’s what’s in store:
SimOEP’20 - The International Conference on Simulation of Organic Electronics and Photovoltaics. - Were you there?
Interview: R&D Engineer, Konrad Domanski discusses the development of our latest tool, Litos Lite ( a must-read for PV researchers).
And the EU PVSEC conference poster awards go to…
Fluxim @ IMID 2020 - The International Meeting on Information Display.
How many papers this year?
SimOEP'20 Virtual Conference. Did you join the discussion?
The 2020 International Conference on Simulation of Organic Electronics and Photovoltaics (SimOEP) which was co-sponsored by Fluxim and hosted by ZHAW was held on the 30th August through 2nd September. The spectre of COVID meant, like most conferences this year we needed to change our plans and host the conference virtually. The upside was our ability to accept many more delegates than we would have normally. An unprecedented 363 researchers registered for the event!
We’d like to thank all the researchers and speakers who took part. Thankfully the technology didn’t let us down and neither did the conference chairs; Beat Ruhstaller (ZHAW/Fluxim) and Evelyne Knapp (ZHAW) (👏). Hopefully next time we’ll be able to host many of you here in Switzerland.
For those of you who were able to participate, we hope you’ll agree that the standard of presentation and subsequent discussion remains, as in previous years, at the cutting edge of what’s next in the fields of organic electronics and photovoltaics.
Interview: Litos Lite - Why we built this unique solar cell stress testing platform.
Litos Lite is the latest measurement tool available from Fluxim.
Launched in February this year this solar cell stress testing platform has proven hugely popular with researchers and can already be found in several leading PV research labs.
So why is it so successful?
We interview R&D Engineer Konrad Domanski to understand more.
What does Litos Lite do?
Litos Lite is a platform to measure JV curves and stability of solar cells in a parallel fashion. With up to 56 channels, heating, cooling, atmosphere control and AM 1.5 illumination, it is a very compact solution for high-throughput, highly-controlled measurements.
How long ago did the development of Litos Lite start and why did we decide to build it?
The idea to build Litos Lite came during the development of Litos. Litos is a very advanced stability-measurement platform equipped with different options for in-situ measurements. When presenting the prototype of Litos to potential customers, we were getting feedback that pointed us towards developing a similar solution but one with more flexibility in terms of sample sizes and with AM 1.5 illumination. You could say that Litos Lite was built by popular demand.
Because of many synergies between the two instruments, we managed to develop Litos Lite in unprecedented time of only 8 months. Our strategy was to release a product with a limited number of features and then add new ones later on, when we get feedback from customers. It is a good example of agile development – a new trend in HW development. We have an exciting lineup of additional features, both software and hardware, still to come this year.
You mentioned customer collaboration was integral to the development of Litos Lite. How did that work?
Being close to potential and existing customers was at the core of the development process. We were constantly asking for feedback, scouting for feature ideas and verifying our assumptions. This is a crucial part of the process. Being scientists ourselves, we risk developing products to suit our own needs. We are often so-called super-users of our own products and tend to wish for relatively advanced features, which most of the market may not need. This is why letting the customers shape the product is so important to achieve a good product-market fit.
We only launched this tool in February 2020. Why do you think this tool is proving so popular with researchers?
Again, the success of Litos Lite is down to the fact that we let the researchers guide the development and we built a product they asked for. We were able to focus on the important features (such as integrating several different solar simulators and cooling for standard test conditions), while shelving other ideas such as high illumination for accelerated stability tests, which attracted little interest from our customers. In the end we have a versatile and highly-configurable system, which can measure both parallel JVs and stability of solar cells. The unique feature is AM 1.5 illumination and the ability to program complex measurement routines.
Can you explain further how Litos Lite differs from Litos?
While Litos Lite is suited for parallel JV and stability measurements of solar cells, Litos is a dedicated stability measurement tool. Litos can be used to measure both solar cells and organic/perovskite LEDs thanks to integrated photodiodes for luminescence measurement Litos Lite is dedicated to solar cells. The big selling point of Litos is the availability of in-situ techniques. It can perform UV-vis spectrometry, photo and electroluminescence measurements as well as accelerated measurements with more than 10 suns of light. With our additional system, Paios, the user can also perform AC, DC and spectroscopic measurements such as transient photocurrent/voltage, CELIV, impedance spectroscopy and many more – all this while ageing their devices in highly controlled environment. Litos Lite offers more flexibility for the researcher in terms of sample holders which are custom made to the customers specification and unlike Litos are not integrated into the main chassis. This allows for samples to be placed inside a glove box and for several different solar simulators to be used.
What kind of researcher should be using Litos Lite?
Litos Lite should be a consideration for all researchers working on 3rd generation perovskite and organic solar cells. The main advantage of the tool is revealed when many samples have to be measured simultaneously. For JV measurements, Litos Lite is especially useful for measuring perovskite solar cells, which require the measurement to be performed very slowly and often in both directions – here Litos Lite can measure a batch of samples in a fraction of a time of a traditional or multiplexed measurement station. One can also program a complex routine measuring at different light intensities and temperatures. For stability measurements which are by definition long-term measurements, Litos Lite stands out in terms of AM 1.5 illumination source, temperature and atmospheric control. And last but not least, the control software, which is a result of over 1 year of development by our in-house team allows for quick programming of measurement and managing the data. We are also constantly adding new features and listening to our customers for ideas: for example with the last release we added a new tool for data export into different formats and a new way to organize the data within the software. With the next software release coming any time now, we will support a new AAA large-area LED solar simulator from Wavelabs, the LS2, and we will also unveil the new cooling module for standard test conditions measurements.
Interested in Litos Lite? Download the brochure here
EU PVSEC Poster Awards
EU PVSEC is the largest international conference for photovoltaic research, technologies and applications and is a highly regarded science-to-science and science-to-industry platform. This year’s event (you guessed it) was streamed live over the internet and presented a staggering 1,000 plenary and oral presentations over 5 days.
We were very pleased to see our friend and former colleague Matthias Diethelm (EMPA) win a EU PVSEC poster award with his submission entitled ”Novel Electro-Thermal Modeling Approach for DC and AC Solar Cell Characterization” and for the publication of his paper “Finite element modeling for analysis of electroluminescence and infrared images of thin-film solar cells” which was published in the latest edition on Elsevier’s Solar Energy journal.
The paper details:
Organic solar cells simulated by a coupled 2 + 1D finite element method approach.
Sheet resistance extraction by fitting simulated currents to electroluminescence images.
Thermal imaging combined with electro-thermal simulation to investigate the shunting behavior.
Mathias previously worked as an R&D Engineer before embarking on his PhD and this paper partly explains how our large scale simulation software Laoss came into existence.
View the Loass brouchure
Fluxim @ IMID 2020 Virtual Conference
Those of you involved in the R&D of display technologies will be well aware of the IMID conferences and their prestigious standing amongst academics and industry leaders alike. They usually involve a welcome trip to South Korea but alas this year the conference was a prerecorded, virtual affair. Nonetheless the conference delivered the expected high standard of presentations, engaging discussions and tutorials aimed at newcomers to display technologies.
We were happy to be invited to submit 4 talks this year which we’ve made available here (click the link to watch):
Fluxim’s founder, Beat Ruhstaller was invited to give a tutorial jointly presented with Fluxim’s Balthasar Blülle on:
In his role as professor at the ZHAW School of Engineering Beat was also invited to speak at the in the Special Session II: AI for Display where he presented:
“Display simulation from charge-exciton interactions to light-management”
Two further presentations from our R&D team were also given at the conference which you may also be interested in:
How many papers?
Despite the additional challenges this past year has presented, the world of research continues to publish high impact papers at an impressive rate. We are very pleased to have our software and measurement tools associated with 65 papers so far this year. Congratulations to all of the authors and co-authors and thank you for putting your trust in our products. Here’s a few of the more recent papers that have been published over the summer:
Space-charge-limited electron and hole currents in hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites
Sajedi Alvar, M., Blom, P.W.M. & Wetzelaer, G.A.H. Nat Commun 11, 4023 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17868-0
Summary: Scan rate dependent measurements on single carrier perovskite devices. The paper shows that rate dependence can be reproduced in simulations by using T- and frequency-dependent relative permittivity.
Fluxim tools used in the research: Paios to calculate the rate-dependent IV.
Application of Fluorescent Molecules as Noninvasive Sensors for Optoelectronic Characterization on Nanometer Length Scales
Thomas Ferschke, Alexander Hofmann, Wolfgang Brütting, and Jens Pflaum, ACS Applied Electronic Materials 2020 2 (1), 186-194 DOI: 10.1021/acsaelm.9b00687
Summary: Sensing layer methodology with optical excitation to probe charge distribution in OLEDs.
Fluxim Tools used in the research: Exploited the Setfos Drift-diffusion model to describe the polar layers due to spontaneous orientation polarization and measured the fluorescence sensor containing OLEDs with Paios.
Lithium Garnet Li 7 La 3 Zr 2 O 12 Electrolyte for All‐Solid‐State Batteries: Closing the Gap between Bulk and Thin Film Li‐Ion Conductivities
Jordi Sastre, Xubin Chen, Abdessalem Aribia, Ayodhya N. Tiwari, Yaroslav E. Romanyuk, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 10.1021/acsami.0c09777, (2020).
Summary: A scalable fabrication method for LLZO films with high conductivity close to the bulk value.
Fluxim Tools used in the research: Paios was used to perform impedance spectroscopy and equivalent circuit fitting for ionic conductivity analysis. The electronic conductivity was estimated from the DC polarization curve.
You can view more papers that have utilised Fluxim tools here.
Thanks for taking the time to read this quarter’s newsletter, if you have research news you’d like to share with us please let us know here.
Hopefully by the time our next newsletter comes around the zeitgeist will be about confirmed life on Venus and less of the viral kind.
Until then Uf Widerluege!
Your Fluxim Team
P.S. We’re very active on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. You can follow our research updates here:
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