This book presents an important technique to process organic photovoltaic devices. The basics, materials aspects and manufacturing of photovoltaic devices with solution processing are explained. Solution processable organic solar cells - polymer or solution processable small molecules - have the potential to significantly reduce the costs for solar electricity and energy payback time due to the low material costs for the cells, low cost and fast fabrication processes (ambient, roll-to-roll), high material utilization etc. In addition, organic photovoltaics (OPV) also provides attractive properties like flexibility, colorful displays and transparency which could open new market opportunities. The material and device innovations lead to improved efficiency by 8% for organic photovoltaic solar cells, compared to 4% in 2005. Both academic and industry research have significant interest in the development of this technology. This book gives an overview of the booming technology, focusing on the solution process for organic solar cells and provides a state-of-the-art report of the latest developments. World class experts cover fundamental, materials, devices and manufacturing technology of OPV technology.

This book presents an important technique to process organic photovoltaic devices. The basics, materials aspects and manufacturing of photovoltaic devices with solution processing are explained. Solution processable organic solar cells - polymer or solution processable small molecules - have the potential to significantly reduce the costs for solar electricity and energy payback time due to the low material costs for the cells, low cost and fast fabrication processes (ambient, roll-to-roll), high material utilization etc. In addition, organic photovoltaics (OPV) also provides attractive properties like flexibility, colorful displays and transparency which could open new market opportunities. The material and device innovations lead to improved efficiency by 8% for organic photovoltaic solar cells, compared to 4% in 2005. Both academic and industry research have significant interest in the development of this technology. This book gives an overview of the booming technology, focusing on the solution process for organic solar cells and provides a state-of-the-art report of the latest developments. World class experts cover fundamental, materials, devices and manufacturing technology of OPV technology.

This book provides a broad and nuanced overview of the achievements and legacy of Professor William (“Bill”) Goddard in the field of computational materials and molecular science. Leading researchers from around the globe discuss Goddard’s work and its lasting impacts, which can be seen in today’s cutting-edge chemistry, materials science, and biology techniques. Each section of the book closes with an outline of the prospects for future developments. In the course of a career spanning more than 50 years, Goddard’s seminal work has led to dramatic advances in a diverse range of science and engineering fields. Presenting scientific essays and reflections by students, postdoctoral associates, collaborators and colleagues, the book describes the contributions of one of the world’s greatest materials and molecular scientists in the context of theory, experimentation, and applications, and examines his legacy in each area, from conceptualization (the first mile) to developments and extensions aimed at applications, and lastly to de novo design (the last mile). Goddard’s passion for science, his insights, and his ability to actively engage with his collaborators in bold initiatives is a model for us all. As he enters his second half-century of scientific research and education, this book inspires future generations of students and researchers to employ and extend these powerful techniques and insights to tackle today’s critical problems in biology, chemistry, and materials. Examples highlighted in the book include new materials for photocatalysts to convert water and CO2 into fuels, novel catalysts for the highly selective and active catalysis of alkanes to valuable organics, simulating the chemistry in film growth to develop two-dimensional functional films, and predicting ligand–protein binding and activation to enable the design of targeted drugs with minimal side effects.

Polymers in Organic Electronics: Polymer Selection for Electronic, Mechatronic, and Optoelectronic Systems provides readers with vital data, guidelines, and techniques for optimally designing organic electronic systems using novel polymers. The book classifies polymer families, types, complexes, composites, nanocomposites, compounds, and small molecules while also providing an introduction to the fundamental principles of polymers and electronics. Features information on concepts and optimized types of electronics and a classification system of electronic polymers, including piezoelectric and pyroelectric, optoelectronic, mechatronic, organic electronic complexes, and more. The book is designed to help readers select the optimized material for structuring their organic electronic system.Chapters discuss the most common properties of electronic polymers, methods of optimization, and polymeric-structured printed circuit boards. The polymeric structures of optoelectronics and photonics are covered and the book concludes with a chapter emphasizing the importance of polymeric structures for packaging of electronic devices. - Provides key identifying details on a range of polymers, micro-polymers, nano-polymers, resins, hydrocarbons, and oligomers - Covers the most common electrical, electronic, and optical properties of electronic polymers - Describes the underlying theories on the mechanics of polymer conductivity - Discusses polymeric structured printed circuit boards, including their rapid prototyping and optimizing their polymeric structures - Shows optimization methods for both polymeric structures of organic active electronic components and organic passive electronic components

Photovoltaics technology, or solar cell, has been developed for more than a half century. This idea that utilizes energy from an infinite resource is indeed fascinating and drives scientists and engineers to devote themselves to this field. It is one of the major renewable energy types which accounts for 2% of the global total electricity consumption in 2018 and this percentage is still growing in a steady trend. According to a publicized prediction, the solar power could supply 20% of the total electricity demand in 2030 because of drastically dropping price per watt. Although a brilliant future of solar cell is projected, there are still many unknown physical phenomena and engineering difficulties nonetheless. These challenges in photovoltaics are thus of our interest to work on. The state of art highest efficiency photovoltaics is multi-junction inorganic solar cell, which is used in astronautic application. Yet the complicated fabrication processes and high cost limit its usage. It is the reason that silicon solar cell with moderate efficiency and process rules the whole solar cell market. However, the world still needs a different type of solar cell to fulfill the requirements of low weight, flexible, transparent, non-toxic and solution process compatibility to accustom to the other environment conditions. Organic solar cell is one of the strong candidates for reaching this target. In this dissertation, I aim to achieve high efficiency organic solar cells in single-junction and multi-junction structure with different strategies. There are the modification of charge transport layer and interconnecting layer for a better Ohmic contact and fermi level pining as well as the sub-cell current matching by third photo-active component. In Chap. 3, the project for improving the transport properties of single junction devices has been explored. A high mobility Indium Oxide In2O3 as an universal electron transport layer was chosen and improved the original device efficiencies for 10%. The physical fundamentals for efficiency improvement have been found that the crystalline In2O3 with highly aligned nanocrystallites can induce the crystallization of polymer into a preferential molecular packing for the charge transport and the charge extraction in the crystalline In2O3 devices is significantly faster than its counterpart devices. Based on the work principle of Fermi level pinning, organic tandem solar cells with a tunnel junction consisted of zirconium (IV) acetylacetonate (Zr-Acac) has been developed and discussed in Chap. 4. The Zr-Acac has a suitable low work function to pin the Fermi level of the interconnecting layer and hence, can effectively behave as the charge recombination function for the tandem device. Furthermore, Zr-Acac requires a least harmful preparation process method in the tandem devices. Comparing to the reference device, the Zr-Acac interconnecting layer can effectively enhance the efficiency by 20%. The other strategies to improve the tandem organic solar cells with the ternary structure have been discussed in Chap. 5 and Chap. 6. Broadening the light absorption spectrum needs the optimization of current matching among different sub-cells with good interconnecting layer. Herein, it is firstly discovered that using ternary blend sub-cell in tandem device can finely optimize the current matching via tuning the materials composition in the ternary blend. The voltage-current trade-off in the tandem devices can be achieved. Due to the amorphous nature of the used small molecular, the phase separation in this ternary blend upon heating is sufficiently suppressed, resulting in a good thermal stability and viable for a better environment of interconnecting layer preparation. The device efficiency measured in the lab has reached 13% and the certified device efficiency is 11.5% by NREL, which achieves the world record as of October 2018. My conclusion and future perspective of these works on organic solar cells are summarized in Chap. 7.

Encyclopedia of Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Four Volume Set comprehensively covers all renewable energy resources, including wind, solar, hydro, biomass, geothermal energy, and nuclear power, to name a few. In addition to covering the breadth of renewable energy resources at a fundamental level, this encyclopedia delves into the utilization and ideal applications of each resource and assesses them from environmental, economic, and policy standpoints. This book will serve as an ideal introduction to any renewable energy source for students, while also allowing them to learn about a topic in more depth and explore related topics, all in a single resource.Instructors, researchers, and industry professionals will also benefit from this comprehensive reference. - Covers all renewable energy technologies in one comprehensive resource - Details renewable energies' processes, from production to utilization in a single encyclopedia - Organizes topics into concise, consistently formatted chapters, perfect for readers who are new to the field - Assesses economic challenges faced to implement each type of renewable energy - Addresses the challenges of replacing fossil fuels with renewables and covers the environmental impacts of each renewable energy

Organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells have the potential to make a significant contribution to the increasing energy needs of the future. In this book, 15 chapters written by selected experts explore the required characteristics of components present in an OPV device, such as transparent electrodes, electron- and hole-conducting layers, as well as electron donor and acceptor materials. Design, preparation, and evaluation of these materials targeting highest performance are discussed. This includes contributions on modeling down to the molecular level to device-level electrical and optical testing and modeling, as well as layer morphology control and characterization. The integration of the different components in device architectures suitable for mass production is described. Finally, the technical feasibility and economic viability of large-scale manufacturing using fast inexpensive roll-to-roll deposition technologies is assessed.

This dissertation, "Transparent Electrode Design and Interface Engineering for High Performance Organic Solar Cells" by Di, Zhang, 张笛, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: With the growing needs for energy, photovoltaic solar cells have attracted increasing research interests owing to its potentially renewable, feasible and efficient applications. Compared to its inorganic counterparts, organic solar cell (OSC) is highly desirable due to the low-cost processing, light weight, and the capability of flexible applications. While rapid progress has been made with the conversion efficiency approaching 10%, challenges towards high performance OSCs remain, including further improving device efficiency, fully realizing flexible applications, achieving more feasible large-area solution process and extending the stability of organic device. Having understood the key technical issues of designing high performance OSCs, we focus our work on (1) introducing flexible graphene transparent electrodes into OSCs as effective anode and cathode; (2) interface engineering of metal oxide carrier transport layers (CTLs) in OSCs through incorporating plasmonic metal nanomaterials;(3)proposing novel film formation approach for solution-processed CTLs in OSCs in order to improve the film quality and thus device performance. The detailed work is listed below: 1. Design of transparent graphene electrodes for flexible OSCs Flexible graphene films are introduced into OSCs as transparent electrodes, which complement the flexibility of organic materials. We demonstrate graphene can function effectively as both the anode and cathode in OSCs: a) Graphene anode: we propose an interface modification for graphene to function as anode as an alternative to using aconventional polymer CTL. Using the proposed interfacial modification, graphene OSCs show enhanced performance. Further analysis shows that our approach provides favorable energy alignment and improved interfacial contact. b) Graphene cathode: efficient OSCs using graphene cathode are demonstrated, using a new composite CTL of aluminum-titanium oxide (Al-TiO2).We show that the role of Al is two-fold: improving the wettability as well as reducing the work function of graphene. To facilitate electron extraction, self-assembledTiO2is employed on the Al-covered graphene, which exhibits uniform morphology. 2. Incorporation of plasmonic nanomaterialsinto the metal oxide CTLinOSCs By incorporating metallic nanoparticles (NPs) into the TiO2CTLin OSCs, we demonstrate the interesting plasmonic-electrical effect which leads to optically induced charge extraction enhancement. While OSCs using TiO2CTL can only operate by ultraviolet (UV)activation, NP-incorporated TiO2enables OSCs to perform efficiently at a plasmonic wavelength far longer than the UV light. In addition, the effciency of OSCs incorporated with NPs is notably enhanced. We attribute the improvement to the charge injection of plasmonically excited electrons from NPs into TiO2. 3. Formation of uniform TiO2CTLfor large area applications using a self-assembly approach A solution-processed self-assembly method is proposed for forming large-area high-quality CTL films. Owing to the careful control of solvent evaporation, uniform film is formed, leading to enhanced OSC performance. Meanwhile, our method is capable of forming large-area films. This approach can contribute to future low-cost, large-area applications. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5295530 Subjects: Electrodes - Design and construction Solar cells - Mater

This book contains chapters in which the problems of modern photovoltaics are considered. The majority of the chapters provide an overview of the results of research and development of different types of solar cells. Such chapters are completed by a justification for a new solar cell structure and technology. Of course, highly effective solar energy conversion is impossible without an in-depth examination of the solar cell components as physical materials. The relations between structural, thermodynamic, and optical properties of the physical material without addressing the band theory of solids are of both theoretical and practical interest. Requirements formulated for the material are also to be used for maximally efficient conversion of solar radiation into useful work.

With the recently well developed areas of Internet of Thing, consumer wearable gadgets and artificial intelligence, flexible and stretchable electronic devices have spurred great amount of interest from both the global scientific and industrial communities. As an emerging technology, flexible and stretchable electronics requires the scale-span fabrication of devices involving nano-features, microstructures and macroscopic large area manufacturing. The key factor behind covers the organic, inorganic and nano materials that exhibit completely different mechanical and electrical properties, as well as the accurate interfacial control between these components. Based on the fusion of chemistry, physics, biology, materials science and information technology, this review volume will try to offer a timely and comprehensive overview on the flexible and stretchable electronic materials and devices. The book will cover the working principle, materials selection, device fabrication and applications of electronic components of transistors, solar cells, memories, sensors, supercapacitors, circuits and etc.