EU Life+

Innovative green plasma

Fujifilm has developed the green-plasma technology platform in the past 12 years in collaboration with several highly qualified Universities in Europe. Now, this technology platform is available for exploration purposes by a complete new industrial sector of flexible electronics. This offers great opportunities for the European economy in the coming decade.

Life plus project

Life-Green-Plasma is a running project subsidized by the European Union. The main objective is to demonstrate and disseminate to the European Industrial Community a new environmental friendly technology for manufacturing of flexible electronic components. Our Life-Green-Plasma project matches closely with the EU ambitions that requests to ‘decouple economic growth from the use of resources’ to ‘shift to a low carbon economy’ and ‘to increase the use of renewable energy resources’. To realize these EU ambitions large scale low cost roll-to-roll manufacturing of thin film photovoltaics is inevitable. This requires the technical solutions such as offered by our novel atmospheric green-plasma technology platform.  ---> Read more about Life+

Environmental care

The Life Green Plasma project links to relevant environmental issues in the EU:

• The efficiency of use of natural resources for a range of products in the fast growing business area of flexible electronics and
• The accelerated introduction of sustainable photovoltaic energy system.

The green aspect is one of the unique selling points that could be used by industrial partners to promote their products (based on green technology). The main environmental targets of the life green plasma project are listed below.

The energy efficiency of the manufacturing industry of flexible electronics

Our technology will significantly reduce the energy requirements of the manufacturing industry of flexible electronics. Reduction of this fast growing energy need is the first environmental target of this project.

The raw material use efficiency for flexible electronics

The manufacturing industry today uses vacuum plasma deposition systems that are characterized by a low efficiency . This is inefficient with natural resources “by nature”. Our novel atmospheric APG-CVD process has a high precursor-to-product ratio of 90% and is based on non-toxic precursor chemistry. Substitution of the traditional technology with our novel atmospheric green plasma process will decrease the annual raw material waste.

Substitution of traditional solar cell panels by thin film PhotoVoltaics

The existing (amorf or crystalline) SiOx-based solar cell panels will be facing increasing competition in the near future of flexible foil-based thin film PhotoVoltaics. To match the strongly increasing demand for renewable solar cell energy solutions in Europe. Large scale manufacturing of these Thin Film Photo Voltaic systems requires new process technology for the deposition of a variety of  functional layers, with functions like mechanical protection and with moisture barrier properties. This accelerated introduction of Thin Film Photo Voltaic systems is highly relevant for the carbon footprint of the solar cell manufacturing process because this introduces the opportunity to replace the traditional glass protection panels by thin polymeric foil protection systems with considerable less energy use.

Accelerated introduction of sustainable photovoltaic energy systems in Europe

The nuclear power disaster in Japan, and the subsequent changes in the EU strategy towards sustainable energy resources reflect a tremendous challenge for the industry in these fields. In the Netherlands only 4% of the energy use is based on photovoltaic and wind energy, while the ambitions of the EU are high. Therefore drastic innovation is needed. With the novel atmospheric green-plasma technology large scale roll-to-roll manufacturing of cheap, light weight flexible solar cell solutions is possible.

Project objectives

An important project objective is comparison in efficiency of vacuum plasma with our new atmospheric technology. With our new technology we aim on an accelerated introduction of sustainable flexible photovoltaic energy systems in Europe. Other objectives are:

• Raising the energy efficiency of the manufacturing of flexible electronics
• Lowering raw material use for flexible electronics
• Reducing carbon footprint e.g. by engineering technology with lowest possible power consumption

Partners

To reach the goals of the project Fujifilm Plasma Competence Center works together with Semco Engineering and Fraunhofer. Together they have the required resources to materialize the business plan and the technology expansion program.