Stergios Logothetidis

HOPE-A

Intelligent Nanomanufacturing of Flexible Organic Electronic Devices:

Towards the Industry 4.0

Nanotechnology Lab LTFN and Center of Organic and Printed Electronics Hellas (COPE-H)
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Hellenic Organic & Printed Electronics Association (HOPE-A), Greece

Organic and Printed Electronics (OEs) is one of the most rapidly expanding sectors that will revolutionize our everyday life by enabling energy generation, lighting, visualization of information, sensing and digital functionalities to existing and new products and surfaces. The outstanding advantages of OEs include flexible and free- form factor, lightweight, conformability for adaptation to curved and complex surfaces and capability for fabrication by low-cost production processes such as Roll-to-Roll (R2R) printing.

In order to unleash the huge potential of OEs towards the digital transformation of industry to the Industry 4.0, it is essential to optimize all the steps of the nano-manufacturing process and to fabricate high quality nanomaterials and nanolayers (organic, polymer blends, electrodes, etc), and devices with nanometer scale precision over large areas in combination to tunable and reproducible thickness, structure, optical and electronic properties. This will enable the widespread implementation of OEs in existing and new consumer products from Energy, Lighting, Displays and Surfaces, Electronic Circuits, all (Bio) Sensors, Wearables, ICT, IoT, etc, in order to open the way for the Smart Society 5.0.

In this presentation, we provide an overview of our novel concept for the intelligent digital nano-manufacturing of OE devices, such as Organic Photovoltaics (OPVs) and Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) with unique pilot to production lines such as R2R printing and gas transport processes (Organic Vapour Phase Deposition). These unique nano-manufacturing facilities were recently developed and supported by several EU and National R&D projects and are finalized through the EU funded project H2020 Factory of the Future, Project SmartLine (www.smartline-project.eu). Also, we will present the activities for the development of robust, non-destructive, ultra-fast and in-line Precision Metrology (optical, electrical, structural, etc) and the large experimentation data  analytics for the quality control of the developed large area printable & flexible OE devices and the concept for the ultra-fast digital feedback to the pilot and production lines for the closed loop manufacturing of OE devices with tailored performance and high production yield.

In addition, for the achievement of a robust and digital nano-manufacturing of flexible OEs, it is crucial to link the manufacturing processes, the nanostructure features of the OE nanomaterials and devices with the macroscopic functionality through multiscale (from nano- to macro-) characterization and multiscale modelling. In this presentation we will also discuss on our novel strategy towards the fast and reliable development of new materials, devices and the related production processes for the fabrication of tailored OEs (OPVs, OLEDs, Sensors) devices and systems, through an Open Innovation Environment that covers the triangle of manufacturing, modelling and experimentation. These activities are also funded by the EU Project H2020 CORNET  (www.cornet-project.eu).