Jose Dario has been visiting the group from FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg over the summer. He'll talk tomorrow at group meeting - see below for his title and abstract.
Title: Organic Photovoltaics: Fundamentals, Materials and Processing
Speaker: José Dario Perea
Institute of Materials for Electronics and Energy Technology (i-MEET),
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Martensstrasse 7, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
Abstract: The imminent impact of climatic change as well as the world’s growing demand for energy requires fostering new forms of sustainable energy conversion involving low-waste and low-energy manufacturing. Because solution processing can facilitate large scale industrial deployment at reduced energy consumption, accurate theoretical predictions of the thermodynamic, transport, chemical reactions, and electronic structure properties of solutes in solvents can effectively advance sustainable technologies. In this context, organic semiconductors bear a pivotal role because, as opposed to most traditional inorganic semiconductors, these material systems provide access to optoelectronic devices with tailored semiconductor properties, innovative form factors, low specific weight, and color tunability at potentially very low cost (1). To realize these advantages, high solubility, ideally in environmental benign “green” solvents, has to be ensured (2). This presentation discusses the principles of solubility and miscibility and the connection between thermodynamic properties of a molecule and its corresponding photovoltaic potential.
(1) Forrest, S. R. The Path to Ubiquitous and Low-Cost Organic Electronic Appliances on Plastic. Nature 2004, 428, 911−918.
(2) Tait, J. G.; Merckx, T.; Li, W.; Wong, C.; Gehlhaar, R.; Cheyns, D.; Turbiez, M.; Heremans, P. Determination of Solvent Systems for Blade Coating Thin Film Photovoltaics. Adv. Funct. Mater. 2015, 25, 3393−3398.