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Oregon Process Innovation Center

The Oregon Process Innovation Center (OPIC) is a unique, collaborative center for the research, development and commercialization of sustainable manufacturing technologies within the PV industry. OPIC provides an environment for industrial, federal and academic researchers to collaborate in the development of innovative processes for reducing the costs and environmental impacts of PV manufacturing. Capabilities in the center include the staff and expertise to conduct benchtop development and in-process characterization.

Plans are moving forward to install pilot production facilities within OPIC in the coming year to prove out bench-scale technologies at pilot scale. To facilitate this, OPIC is developing a network of strategic industrial partnerships to ensure that these pilot-scale facilities can be scaled-up at production quantities. OPIC capabilities at this time include the development of novel cross-cutting manufacturing technologies for current PV products (optimization, waste and cost reduction) as well as exploratory research and development for future PV product development. The center will provide opportunities to conduct industrial-scale manufacturing process problem solving as well as to train the future PV workforce.

Facility Descriptionf-opic-bp-fig1

OPIC is located within the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute (MBI), a 55,000 square foot high-tech product development facility on the Hewlett Packard campus in Corvallis, Oregon. The MBI is a joint partnership between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Oregon State University (OSU) to research, develop and commercialize microreactor technologies for process intensification. PNNL and OSU are international leaders in the science and engineering of advanced processes with a focus on the interface of micro- and nanotechnology. A key example is the development of patent-pending microreactor-assisted nanomaterial deposition processes (Figure 1), which are at the core of a strategy for displacing expensive vapor-phase process steps within PV manufacturing. As part of the MBI, OPIC will provide desk and laboratory space for industry and academic researchers to physically locate themselves together. Equipment within OPIC and the MBI will be made available to these researchers through the capabilities of the MBI staff.

Operating Strategy

Figure 2 shows the operating strategy for OPIC which heavily leverages the existing operating strategy of the MBI. The existing MBI strategy involves the commercialization of microreactor technologies in concert with industry partners primarily through the functions of capability development, business assessment and application development.

f-opic-fig2

The OPIC operating strategy makes these functions available to other parties interested in commercializing OUS technologies related to nanomanufacturing. Materials researchers interested in commercializing novel chemistries and devices are plugging into existing MBI capabilities for developing scalable processes. OPIC currently has multi-year PV-related projects underway involving demonstration of pilot scale microreactor-assisted deposition. Application development on pilot-scale platforms will be facilitated by industrial sponsors as well as SBIR, STTR and other early-stage funding opportunities. Because we are developing our pilot production capabilities in concert with industry partners capable of scaling up these processes, technology transfer into the marketplace can be facilitated by those partners.

Key Contacts