Aug 6 2015
The Electrochemistry Group of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has built a portable environmental test chamber that can characterize optical and electronic devices under accurately-controlled environmental conditions.
The design of the portable environmental chamber has been licensed to FOM Technologies, which is a spin-off from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) that specialises in creating and supplying R&D equipment for coating and testing of functional printed materials. The portable environmental chamber is now commercially available.
Initially the portable environmental chamber was designed to analyse the stability of highly sensitive printed electronics devices.
Printed electronics, a quickly emerging technology, uses traditional printing methods to transform thin, flexible materials into electrical devices. These economical devices are well suited for numerous applications ranging from flexible building-integrated photovoltaics to smart packaging. Sensitivity of printed components to their environment is one of the key challenges facing the printed electronics sector. Some of these components have to be manufactured and packaged in inert atmospheres that contain about one part-per-million of oxygen and water only.
The Electrochemistry Group developed the portable environmental chamber when they realised the need among researchers and industry experts for testing a component’s stability at extremely low concentrations of contamination.
The chamber has been used widely in NPL research to test organic photovoltaics performance. This could be an economical flexible light-weight substitute to photovoltaic systems used currently.