Professor
Samson A. Jenekhe
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Departments of Chemical
Engineering & Chemistry
Chemistry Room #1315
3:30 PM
University of Washington
Organic Photovoltaics Beyond
Fullerenes
Seminar
sponsored by:
UW-Madison
MRSEC
Finding a way to meet the energy needs of the
world’s
growing
population
via
an
environmentally sustainable paradigm is among
the grand challenges facing society. Although the
sun represents the most abundant potential
source of pollution-free energy on earth,
electrical power from current photovoltaic
technologies is too expensive compared with
that from fossil fuels. Organic photovoltaics
(OPVs) field aims to develop novel organic
materials and devices that could potentially
revolutionize
solar
energy
conversion
technologies, to make them cheaper than fossil
fuels. Fullerene-based electron acceptors have
provided the foundation for advances in
fundamental
understanding
of
charge
photogeneration, charge transport, morphology
and practical developments in OPVs in the last
20 years. New electron-acceptor materials are
long sought to overcome the small photovoltage,
high-cost, poor photochemical stability, and
other limitations of fullerene-based organic
photovoltaics. Our years of efforts have recently
led to major advances in developing nonfullerene OPVs that promise far superior
performance and ruggedness.
.