Publication date: 22nd July 2026
Large-scale flexible photovoltaics, including organic photovoltaics (OPV) and perovskite photovoltaics (PPV), have gained increasing attention in recent years due to their potential for low-cost manufacturing and unique advantages such as mechanical flexibility, lightweight design, and semi-transparency. These properties enable new application fields beyond conventional photovoltaics, including building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV). Roll-to-roll (R2R) printing offers a highly scalable manufacturing approach, allowing rapid fabrication of large-area thin-film modules on flexible substrates.
However, transferring high-performing laboratory-scale devices into industrially relevant module sizes remains a major challenge. Performance losses during upscaling, as well as stability limitations, continue to represent key barriers for market introduction. In this contribution, we present strategies to minimize upscaling losses by transferring advanced OPV and PPV material systems and device architectures to flexible substrates using industrially relevant printing processes.
For R2R-printed PPV, we demonstrate recent advances achieved through optimized perovskite precursor formulations, enabling high efficiencies and improved operational stability under ambient production conditions. For OPV, a detailed analysis of the performance losses during scale-up from 0.1 cm² laboratory cells to 210 cm² R2R-printed modules is presented. Furthermore, the optical properties of the module stacks can be tailored over a broad range of transparencies, enabling application-specific optimization from high-efficiency modules for façade integration to highly transparent solutions for photovoltaic windows.
Comprehensive lifetime studies complete the assessment and highlight remaining challenges and pathways towards reducing market entry barriers for large-scale flexible photovoltaics.
The authors acknowledge the support of “Solar Factory of the Future” as part of the Energy Campus Nuremberg (EnCN), which is supported by the Bavarian State Government (FKZ 20.2-3410.5-4-5).
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