University of Southern Denmark

Overview:
The University of Southern Denmark welcomed the first students onto the campus in Odense in September 1966, and things have been developing by leaps and bounds ever since. SDU now have five faculties with more than 32,000 students, almost 20% of whom are from abroad, and more than 4,000 employees distributed across our main campus in Odense and regional campuses in Slagelse, Kolding, Esbjerg and Sønderborg.
SDU conducts world-class research and are one of the top fifty young universities in the world. Every day more than 2,000 researchers and 32,000 students build on the university’s reputation as a centre of academic excellence.
Research:
The University of Southern Denmark consists of five faculties:
<ul>
<li>Faculty of Engineering</li>
<li>Faculty of Health Sciences</li>
<li>Faculty of Science</li>
<li>Faculty of Business and Social Sciences</li>
<li>Faculty of Humanities</li>
</ul>
Every faculty consists of several departments, where the departments have a noticeable academic and economic independence and responsibility. Together departments and centres cover a wide range of research fields and educational opportunities.
Industry Partnerships:
SDU works purposefully to create dialogue between the university’s researchers and the surrounding society. To promote and make communication and knowledge exchange visible, faculties cooperate with various external parties. These activities are organised in centres. The centres serve to promote special purposes in research, education or knowledge exchange.
SDU RIO (SDU Research &amp; Innovation Organisation) supports collaboration between research, education, the business community and the public sector.

<h1 id="background">Background</h1>
Due to rapid performance increase along with semi-transparency and free-form design in shape and size, OPV has entered the Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) market offering new integration routes.
Several recent high impact research studies have demonstrated that metal oxide interlayers are the main bottleneck for the lifetime of new high-performance organic photovoltaics, however, the few lab-scale solutions suggested to mitigate this effect are not compatible with industrial scale up.
If one can mitigate the interface degradation at the metal oxide interlayers, over 20 years lifetime for OPV can be expected (4 years of 1 sun illumination), which is a game changer for the technology.
<h1 id="technology-overview">Technology Overview</h1>
SDU researchers have a new patented technology (TRL 4) based on metal oxide foils as contact layers in OPV, which will increase the lifetime of commercial OPV from &lt;10 years to 20 years. The OxideEnergy foils are developed for and tested with world leading OPV industry, and will radically increase the market size of OPV.
<img src="https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/assets.in-part.com/figures/Evwx4EuSXGdcwI9Xv6cA_oxide1.PNG" alt="Figure 1" />
<h3 id="-stage-of-development-">Stage of Development</h3>
The researchers have developed the new OxideEnergy technology on small scale, and verified their successful integration in OPV, including demonstration of significant lifetime improvements. Currently, they are working on scaling up the technology using dynamic and large volume Roll-to-Roll (R2R) vacuum sputtering technology, which is also compatible with industrial standards.
<h1 id="opportunity">Opportunity</h1>
SDU are scaling the sputtering method to advanced industrial Roll-to-Roll (R2R) manufacturing tools (TRL 6), to demonstrate low-cost and large scale.
SDU are aiming at a new spin-out company in 2022 that will bring OxideEnergy to the OPV industry.
The researchers have access to world class R2R industrial sized manufacturing facilities at SDU NanoSYD.
The researchers are part of the H2020 EU project ‘CITYSOLAR’
SDU are looking for collaboration – both in upscaling and testing as well as in spinning the technology out in a new company.