Topic: A plethora of photovoltaics applications enabled by high throughput screening of organic semiconductors

Lecturer: Prof. Mariano Campoy-Quiles (lnstitute of Materials Science of Barcelona, Spain)

Time: June 14, 2024 (10:30-11:30), UTC+8

Venue: Lecture Hall of International School of Materials Science and Engineering ( Room 201 of West Campus Library)

Biography: 

Prof. Mariano Campoy-Quiles is a physicist from the University of Santiago de Compostela (2000), and has been awarded a PhD in experimental physics from Imperial College London, UK (2005), a Japan Society for Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellowship (2007), a Ramon y Cajal research fellowship (2009), and was awarded a permanent position as a tenured scientist of CSIC (2012). He received the Most Outstanding Young Researcher in Experimental Physics Award (from the Spanish Royal Society of Physics and Fundacion BBVA) (2012)。 He leads a 12-15 people group at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB) that has built substantial research efforts on solar photovoltaic (light to electric) and thermoelectric (heat to electric) energy conversion. He has published over 140 papers, and cited over 10,000 times. He has recently co-founded the spin-off company Molecular Gate S.L.

Abstract: 

The change in energy paradigm towards sustainable sources implies the large-scale deployment of highly efficient solar technologies. Novel technologies are needed for integration into buildings (lightweight, high incidence angle tolerance and neutral colors (semitransparency)), greenhouses (complementary transmission with plant needs), infrastructure (robustness, integrability), wearables (lightweight, flexibility), indoor photovoltaics (high tolerance to low irradiances) as well as beyond photovoltaic farms (ever increasing efficiency). Organic based photovoltaics are well suited for this huge challenge, as can be produced with the largest color pallet and transparency degree imaginable, as well as tunable flexibility, lightweight, etc. Indeed, there is an infinite number of molecules that can be synthesized to match our needs. The bottleneck, then, becomes how to identify and screen the best potential candidates and device structures for each application.

In this seminar, we will show our current strategy to tackle this challenge: combining high throughput material screening methods with a spectrum on demand light source. First, we will briefly describe a novel methodology for the fast evaluation of organic semiconductor systems for photovoltaics based on samples with gradients in the relevant parameters of interest (thickness, microstructure, composition) coupled to hyperspectral imaging. Then, we will present a combinatorial screening consisting of thousands of solar cells, centered on wide bandgap materials for indoor applications, and, on the other hand, narrow bandgap for agrivoltaic applications. Finally, we use the fast screening and the SOLS to optimize a new multijunction concept that we called Rainbow solar cells, aimed at very high light to electricity power conversion. This spectral splitting geometry consists in a series of sub-cells placed next to each other laterally, and illuminated through an optical component that splits the incoming white beam into its spectral components, thus matching local spectrum and absorption for each sub-cell.

Rewritten by: Yu Mengmei

Edited by: Li Tiantian, Wang Jingjing

Source: International Office of WUT, International School of Materials Science and Engineering (School of Materials and Microelectronics)