Flexible solar device charger development is heating up with South African firm Flexopower releasing its Solar Uno and a European project under way.

Flexopower is using a-Si and a-SiGe triple-junction photovoltaic technology for its flexible iPod and mobile phone recharger.

Flexopower’s director, Werner Fischer said: “We now have a distribution point in the EU to support our push into the EU markets,” he said. “There is a product in the pipeline over which I am particularly excited. It is still some three months away from the market. It will be a solar charger for small electronics, with an out-of-the-box, radical design.”

In Europe, a flexible organic solar cell prototype based on a mix of electrically conducting polymers and fullerenes, printed on roll-to-roll machines and designed in an EU project, could come to market next year.
The single cell delivers about 0.6V. By shaping modules with strips connected in series, specific voltages to fit the device requirements can be created.

Encapsulated inside a flexible gas barrier, the cell has about 3,000 hours of life, said project co-ordinator Denis Fichou, head of the French Laboratory of Organics Nanostructures and Semiconductors.