(Image: NPL)
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL; Middlesex, England) has developed a portable environmental test chamber that allows the characterization of optical and electronic components under precisely-controlled atmospheric conditions. The system has been licensed to coating and testing R&D equipment maker FOM Technologies (Lyngby, Denmark) and is now commercially available.
Developed by NPL's Electrochemistry Group, the portable environmental chamber was originally designed for testing the stability of highly sensitive printed electronics components, of which some need to be fabricated and packaged in inert atmospheres containing as little as one part per million of oxygen and water.
The portable environmental chamber portable has built-in electrical connections coupled to an environmental control system that generates, maintains, and keeps track of precise environments for the duration of the tests. Measurements can be performed with independent control of oxygen and humidity concentrations with up to part-per-million precision.
Testing of thin-film devices
The chamber allows tests of the intrinsic stability of highly sensitive components such as those used in plastic and thin-film devices. Typically such components require encapsulation for protection from the environment. Product lifetime is a function of the quality of the encapsulation and the stability of the components under the low concentrations of contamination that they will experience during production and operation.
These chambers have already been used extensively in NPL research to test the performance of organic photovoltaics.
FOM Technologies is a spin-off from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU; Lyngby, Denmark).
Sources:
http://www.npl.co.uk/news/portable-environmental-chamber-licensed-to-fom-technologies
http://www.fomtechnologies.com/portable-environmental-test-chamber