Organic Photovoltaics: Towards Low-Cost Solar Energy

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are promising for developing low cost solar energy conversion technologies. Bulk heterojunction polymer solar cells now have power conversion efficiencies of up to 6-8%. Realization of higher efficiency (greater than 10-15%) requires advances in new polymer semiconductors and device optimization.
Towards this end, our laboratory is exploring molecular and nanoscale engineering approaches to tailoring materials for high performance polymer solar cells. In this talk I will use several examples to illustrate our efforts, including small band-gap donor polymers, nanostructured assemblies of block copolymers, and self-assembled polymer nanowires for constructing efficient polymer and hybrid polymer/nanocrystal solar cells. To overcome the drawbacks of fullerenes new acceptor materials are also being developed for OPVs.

Biography: Samson A. Jenekhe holds the Boeing-Martin Endowed Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington. He received the Ph.D. (Chemical Engineering, 1985) from the University of Minnesota. His research interests are in the chemistry, physics, and engineering of organic semiconductors, electronic and optoelectronic devices, materials and devices for solar energy technologies, self-assembly and soft nanotechnology, and polymer science. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• SPIE
• Optics
• Solar energy
• Photonics
• green
• Performance per watt
• change
• power
• climate
• Power (physics)
• global
• warming
• environment
• photovoltaics
• OPV

[levarian06]

While I'm sure this professor is a genius, he needs to learn how to present. I'm watching this online and falling asleep.