Drying and sintering conductive inks for plastic electronics currently limits the rate of their roll-to-roll manufacture. Near infrared radiation is demonstrated to drastically reduce this process time, achieving conduction under 0.03 U per , in 2 seconds compared to conventional hot-air oven (600 seconds) and infrared methods (84 seconds).

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A primary challenge to the industrial uptake of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSC) is the ability to improve manufacturing efficiency. New thinking is required in terms of lowering cost, improving the process steps and increasing throughput. The typical manufacture of a DSC contains a number of long process steps; the sintering and dyeing of the TiO 2 are prime examples. The current solution is to batch process on rigid substrates or use long energy intensive convection ovens for flexible metal substrates. Here we present a method for reducing some of the bottlenecks in the manufacturing process using near infra red radiation to speed up the thermal treatment of TiO 2 and silver inks reducing their processing times to 12 and 2 seconds from normal process times of 30 and 10 minutes respectively.