Hi there, I am Dr McArdle. I'm a Senior Research Scientist at Power Roll Ltd.
We are a technology development company based in the North East of England.
We are looking to commercialise two exciting new technologies.
The first of our technologies is a solar PV product which is a low-cost, flexible solar cell.
It is based on a unique and patented architecture which enables our PV modules to be fully back-contacted.
The second of our technologies uses a very similar based architecture but it is on energy storage – so a low-cost energy storage device.
So both our technologies are looking at growing in global markets.
Our energy storage device, with it being light-weight, low-cost and flexible is a direct replacement for competitive products.
And our energy generation device, our solar products, are ultra-low-cost, can be manufactured roll to roll, and also are up to five times cheaper than the standard comparative products.
Together, we hope to combine both our energy generation and energy storage products into one to end up with a device less than 1mm thick which can both power and store energy.
From a start-up company’s point of view, one of the key things which we are always aware of is the cost of equipment.
Now with Ossila’s products, especially some of their test equipment, it has allowed us to bring in-house capabilities for being able to develop our own technologies using equipment that is actually within our cost constraints.
It allows us to have a nice suite of equipment which we can process our samples through, on a relatively quick basis, and get good consistent results.
So we also use a lot of Ossila’s test equipment to allow us to screen a lot of our internal processes,
doing material deposition optimisation, ink chemistry optimisation before we transfer all of that knowledge onto our own unique architecture.
Now as a whole, when we combine both the processing and test equipment,
what the overall Ossila package has allowed us to do is get equipment which is very specifically designed towards solar PV optimisation and characterisation.
It has allowed us to save a lot of money by not buying equipment which is over-specified for the requirements that we need.
Hi, I’m Mike, and I’m Tom and here at the University of Sheffield we’re using Ossila products to help develop Power Roll’s unique photovoltaic technology.
Power Roll are working towards an industrial process of fabricating photovoltaic devices but in order to work towards that first of all we have to start on lab-scale devices.
The Ossila scale-up substrates and the Slot-Die Coating system help tackle a key issue
– going from lab-scale devices which are published in literature and that we work on here in the labs all the time,
to the industrial fabrication of large area that we’re aiming for Power Roll as a product.
This is something that is very challenging and with the large area scale-up substrates and the Slot-Die Coating system, we can have a proof-of-concept going towards this industrial scale fabrication.
The recent work we have done here at Power Roll has been progressing very well, we’ve had some record numbers and we are looking to publish very soon.
But this has all been facilitated by Ossila products – it’s all the development that happens on small-scale that we can then take to apply to our larger-scale devices.
We are both thrilled to be working with Power Roll’s exciting PV technology and we wouldn’t be able to keep working on it without lab-scale equipment that can help us improve our devices.