Electro-Mechanical Pick-And-Place Gripper For Automated High-Throughput Photovoltaic Device Fabrication
Sponsors
Professor David P. Fenning
Assistant Professor, Nanoengineering
Deniz Çakan Rishi Kumar
Ph.D. Student Ph.D. Student
dcakan@eng.ucsd.edu rek010@eng.ucsd.edu
Website
Background
The Solar Energy Innovation Laboratory (SOLEIL) specializes in fabrication and characterization of hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite solar cells. Fabrication of devices take place within the lab and, currently, a batch of 20 lab-scale devices can take up to 12 hours of labor. In effort to improve consistency of the solar cell devices, increase throughput, and minimize manual labor, SOLEIL proposes to create an automated electro-mechanical system. The existing system will deposit precursor inks onto a glass substrate placed atop the center of rotation of a spincoater by the gripper. Following deposition, the gripper will transfer substrates to a second station for annealing, and finally to a “parking garage” for storage and subsequent analysis.
Objectives
The project’s objective is to design, prototype, test, and deliver a pick-and-place gripper to transfer glass slide substrates between fabrication stations in a lab-scale line for next-generation perovskite solar cell manufacturing. The gripper’s control must be robust, repeatable over extended use, and controlled by a computer. The system will be operated by graduate and undergraduate student researchers in SOLEIL.
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