Special WFU Physics Colloquium

TITLE: Dye Sensitised Solar Cells (DSSCs), Bulk Heterojunction (BHJ) Solar Cells and Organic Field Effect Transistors (OFETs): Materials Discovery and Processing

SPEAKER: Gavin Collins,

TIME: Monday, July 16, 2012 at 2:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 Olin Physical Laboratory

Organic Electronics is receiving tremendous interest from academic, government and industrial institutions as this field is predicted to be a disruptive technology that will change the way we live our daily lives. Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED), Organic Field Effect Transistors (OFET) and Organic Photovoltaics (OPV) are emerging technologies that are expected to replace conventional inorganic based systems. Organic-based platforms offer access to cheap organic materials that can be easily tuned by chemical modification and made on large scale, fabricated onto flexible surfaces and manufactured via simple printing or evaporation systems that are already commercially available. However, there is an ongoing need to design and develop new organic semiconductor materials that have the required optoelectronic and physical properties to improve device performance and stability to the standard necessary for commercialisation. An understanding of how different processing conditions impact device performance is vital to gaining better insight into material design and optimisation. In this talk, I will present some of our work on designing dual purpose organic dyes for dye sensitised solar cells (DSSCs) that can be deposited from conventional organic solvents and under .solvent free. conditions using supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) to achieve high performance devices (ECE ~ 8%). I will talk about the development of small molecule p-type materials for BHJ solar cells based on functionalised dibenzochrysenes. I will also present our results on applying structure-property relationships to a family of p-type dibenzochrysene derivatives, where processing conditions and molecular structure are vital to achieving a thin film OFET device with a hole mobility >1 cm²/Vs.