Roartis, based in Genk, Belgium specializes in the development, manufacturing and commercialization of specialty adhesives, often customized, for electronic applications. Our portfolio covers a wide range of materials, from electrically conductive adhesives, to thermally conductive resins, (micro-)encapsulation materials, sintering pastes, conductive inks, UV-curable adhesives and coatings, etc.
With state of the art laboratories, we’ve been successfully introducing our materials in high-reliability applications and markets such as automotive, aerospace, defense, semiconductor, medical, as well as other markets, such as the photovoltaic industry, for example.
Although the company was founded in 2008, the name is not yet very broadly known … very likely, as customers know us better from our brands IQ-BOND, IQ-CAST, IQ-SINTER and IQ-INQ.
What’s your role in #mc2dot0?
Within the MC2.0 project, the aim is to develop an approach for “mass customization” of solar panels. This implies ways to move away from traditional sheet-2-sheet processes, to more economic, roll-2-roll processes, preferably, at high speed.
One crucial process step is the interconnection of the individual solar cells. Within the MC2.0 project, the solar cells are from the newer thin-film and organic types, which can only resist modest temperatures. Hence traditional soldering processes seem hard to implement. That temperature limitation, together with the fact that possibly shaped solar cells will be produced, the interconnection material must combine flexibility, excellent conductivity, extremely fast cure at low temperature, and of course, at reasonable costs. Challenging, for sure, but not impossible.
I’m happy we were invited to bring our technology to this project, and work on next generation conductive adhesives which can help realize these technical challenges.
What makes this project so interesting?
Obviously, the solar market is fast growing market. And with Europe’s green deal, this becomes even more a focus area for the European industry. Where the actual solar technology has moved to a large extent to Asian production regions, the aim of this project is to demonstrate fully automated, high speed, low labor, solar manufacturing. If successful, this project may be the start of a European manufacturing , as I call it, 2.0. As outlined before, conductive adhesives will be a crucial factor in the success of that approach. Not difficult to understand this is therefore a unique opportunity for Roartis to be involved and get our materials qualified and demonstrated for this new technology.
