Self-healing polymer sealant for encapsulating flexible solar cells

• Polyisobutylene (PIB)-based sealant for organic photovoltaic devices.
• Sealants compatible with flexible substrates and roll-to-roll processing.
• Sealants show enhanced device stability, increasing T80 from few hours to 20 days.

Herein we demonstrate the utility of polyisobutylene (PIB) as a fully printable self-healing sealant for protecting organic photovoltaic devices from degradation under ambient conditions. These sealants can be applied on flexible substrates using drop casting, spin coating or blade coating. PIB-based crosslinked sealants show excellent device stability, especially the low molecular weight PIB.

PIB-based polymer sealant materials have been successfully coated on polymer photovoltaic devices to improve the environmental stability. Low molecular weight polymer shows higher percentage of crosslinking and hence better stability.Figure optionsDownload as PowerPoint slide