Organic photovoltaics have recently attracted tremendous attention in industry and academia since they offer the potential to significantly change energy production by drastically reducing the
manufacturing cost for solar cells. Organic materials are flexible, lightweight and can be fabricated over large areas via low cost solution-based processing technologies.
The most common solar cell implementation has a bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) blend as the active layer, where electron donor (typically, a light absorbing polymer)
and acceptor (a fullerene) form a bicontinuous network as a result of self-assembly on the nanometer length-scale. Such cells can have power-conversion efficiencies above 6%. A rapid increase
in efficiency over the last decade was accomplished through materials design and morphology control. The goal of our research in this field is to obtain a better understanding
of the nanoscale morphology, packing of the molecules in the donor and acceptor, donor/acceptor microstructure (e.g., crystallite orientation) and how these depend on processing and affect the
solar cell performance. With this knowledge, better cells can be designed.
Research Projects in My Group
- intercallation (link to SSRL page)
- morphology (SAXS).
- packing & orientation.