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Screen printing could be a cheap and easy way of making plastic solar cells.
Ghassan Jabbour and his team at the University of Arizona in Tucson took a sheet
of glass coated with indium tin oxide and spun it while pouring on a
polyethylene-based solution that conducts positive charge. Once this polymer
layer had dried out, they pulled a fine gauze screen into place a few
millimetres above it. To lay down the negative charge-carrying layer of the
solar cell, Jabbour poured a solution containing a polymer/fullerene blend onto
the gauze and forced it through to the sheet beneath. The solar cell
worked—albeit with a low efficiency of 4.3 per cent (Applied Physics
Letters, vol 79, p 2998).