OEs is one of the most rapidly emerging sectors of the Nano Science and Technology, that revolutionizes many industrial applications in (Lighting & Displays, Energy, Buildings, Transport, Photonics, Health, Wearables, IoT, etc) and developed in parallel with the R2R Printing and Vapour Phase Deposition Technologies for its products manufacturing. EU has invested during the last 15-20 years >1Β€ in the FP5-H2020 Programs, whereas the EU member states alone another 2B€ to build the Flexible and Printed Organic Electronics. Thus, OEs is a huge opportunity for EU industry to become a global leader in Equipment, Manufacturing, Automotive, Energy, Packaging, Electronics, Wearables, Health, IoT, etc.
However, the current OE industrial manufacturing processes cannot meet the wider commercialization demands on manufacturing speed, reliability, materials quality, final product efficiency and stability and reduced waste during processing. This is ascribed to the lack of process-adapted, fast, accurate and robust nanoscale analytical tools that could offer reliable quality control of materials/devices and cost effective fabrication for the quick market introduction of advanced products. Most conventional characterization have: a) destructive character (incl. material preparation, chemical treatment, cutting, polishing), b) ex-situ and decoupled operation with no interaction with the process, due to complex engineering, high cost, c) low acquisition/modelling speed (ms-hours, e.g SEM, TEM, AFM), and d) high costs (>100K€, depending on the tool).
The overall aim of RealNano is to develop a novel combination of multimodal, multi-scale, non-destructive and truly fast in-line and real-time nano-characterization tools, and smart modelling methodologies to revolutionize manufacturing of Organic Electronic devices, and which can be applied immediately for numerous industrial applications
