Design of Donor Polymers for Organic Solar Cells
- When?
- Friday 18 November 2011, 16:00
- Where?
- 02ATI02
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Dr Martin Heeney - Imperial College, London
Organic solar cells are a potentially promising source of electrical power for portable and off-grid applications due to their combination of low cost, low weight and mechanical flexibility.
Currently the highest efficiency cells are based upon blends of electron accepting materials, typically fullerene derivatives, and electron donor materials, typically polymers. In this workshop lecture, I will give a brief overview of the operating mechanisms of an organic solar cell with a particular emphasis on how the development of new materials can lead to improvements in device efficiency. In particular the development of new low band gap donor polymers that can harvest more of the solar spectrum will be addressed. I will discuss the impact of polymer backbone structure and π-delocalisation on the frontier molecular orbital energy levels and how this impacts solar cell device performance.