Apolhya® Solar poised to earn its place in the sun

The nanostructured thermoplastic polymer, which stands out for its transparency and ease-of-use, is designed to be incorporated into new-generation photovoltaic solar panels.

Apolhya® Solar was developed at our R&D incubator* and offers a number of innovations for the encapsulating materials used to wrap solar panel photovoltaic modules and hold them together.

When it comes to photovoltaics, transparency is the most important quality. Apolhya® Solar is highly transparent due to its nanostructure. “At the nanometric scale, we are dealing with dimensions much smaller than light wavelengths.Therefore, nanostructures allow us to develop highly transparent materials,” explains Dominique Jousset, in charge of grafted and supramolecular polymer development at Arkema.

ApolhyaTM Solar makes manufacturing simpler and recycling easier. Apolhya® Solar is a 100% thermoplastic product. Once assembled, it requires no curing. And, unlike other thermoplastics on the market, Apolhya® Solar can withstand temperatures of up to 120°C (248°F) and also offers good resistance to moisture.

In fact, the material offers an extremely broad range of applications, from waterproof liners for outdoor terraces to tiny solar panels used to charge portable electronic devices like MP3 players! Apolhya® Solar is compatible with traditional silicon-wafer-based solar panels, of course, but where it will really shine is with new-generation solar panels where the photovoltaic module itself is a thin film applied to a rigid material like glass, or more flexible polymer or metal structures.  Dominique points out, “This precisely is what our R&D incubator is for—to support better-performing new materials until they are ready to reach high-growth markets like photovoltaics.”

* The R&D Incubator is part of the R&D Division. Its mission is to develop products based on certain corporate research programmes and support them until mature enough to market and ready to join an existing Business Unit.

To read more about our R&D Incubator : click here