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Flexible and lightweight solar cells are promising for numerous emerging applications, and organometallic halide perovskites are particularly suitable for flexible solar cell applications. Transferring state of art high efficiency perovskite solar cells (PSCs) processing onto a flexible substrate, however, is challenging, requiring substantial redevelopment of materials compositions, device architectures, and processing conditions. In this work, highly flexible, robust, stable, and high efficiency PSCs based on mica substrate have been successfully developed, exhibiting a champion photovoltaic conversion efficiency (PCE) of 18.0%, retaining more than 91.7% of the original PCE after 5000 cycles of large deformation bending, and being relatively stable against humidity under elevated temperature. Key to such excellent performance is the inorganic and transparent mica substrate that is chemically inert and stable under high temperature, so that processing developed for glass-based high efficiency perovskite solar cells (PSCs) can be readily applied without modification. Furthermore, the layered mica substrate is highly flexible, and van der Waals epitaxial growth of transparent conducting ITO relaxes the mechanical constraint on the PSCs substantially, reducing the strain in the device even under large bending deformation. We believe inorganic flexible mica substrate can be used as a platform for high efficiency PSCs compatible to glass substrate, speeding up the development of flexible PSCs substantially.

Developing a flexible supply chain is important for enterprises to face market volatility and diversity. In order to satisfy order requirements under demand uncertainty, this study constructs a coordinated production planning model of supply chain networks considering production capacity expansion. Besides, the proposed model involves batch production that is commonly used in many companies. The constructed model is then linearised as a mixed-integer linear programming problem to guarantee global optimality. The solution of the reformulated model determines the optimal production, transportation and inventory levels as well as the optimal batch production operations and capacity expansion strategy. Several numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the impacts of production capacity expansion on the operations of the supply chain. [Received: 27 November 2017; Revised: 13 August 2018; Accepted: 29 December 2018].

AbstractHuman capital is the foundation for organizational improvement and innovation. Lots of organizations have been relentlessly focusing on education and trainings for employees to increase their capabilities and organizations’ performance. The objective of this study is to integrate ISO 10015 and quality function deployment (QFD) to set up a framework of human capital management by applying ISO 10015 as a planning tool to systemize the training processes such that an organization can be easily to track the benefits of education and trainings. Moreover, Kano model can be incorporated into QFD in the beginning to classify the education and training needs into different priorities. Through the proposed framework, organizational needs and human capital can be linked to examine the effectiveness of education and trainings as well as the improvement of organization’s performance.