EU-funded ManuCloud develops flexible OLED/photovoltaic manufacturing

Dresden, Germany--After three years of development, the European-Union (EU)-funded “ManuCloud” (distributed cloud product specification and supply chain manufacturing execution infrastructure) project has unveiled its process for on-demand manufacture of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and organic photovoltaic (OPV) modules.

The project partners include Heliatek, the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Organics, Materials, and Electronic Devices (COMEDD), Tridonic Dresden, and GSS Gebäude-Solarsysteme GmbH (Korbussen, Germany). As a demonstration, the partners presented a prototype of a facade module that contains both OLED lighting and OPV energy-harvesting technology (a facade module is an architectural panel section). The partners developed a process to integrate temperature- and pressure-sensitive OLED and OPV devices into glass to create an integrated active-glass laminate.

The ManuCloud project integrates different companies’ manufacturing networks together all the way down to the shop-floor level. The ManuCloud members created a “cloud”-like architecture, which allows users to take advantage of configurable virtualized production networks based on cloud-enabled federated factories supported by software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Large-area light-generation and energy-harvesting devices can have special features like adjustable colors, transparency, and a thin and lightweight structure; it is expected that a substantial share of these devices will be customized.