Developments in Thiophene-based Organic Materials for Photovoltaic Applications

by Dr. Amaresh Mishra (Institute of Organic Chemistry II and Advanced Materials, Ulm University, Ulm)

Monday, August 29, 2011 from 16:00 to 17:00 (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( AG-69 )

TIFR, Colaba Mumbai 400005 India

Description

Conjugated oligo- based organic semiconductors are widely used bench mark nanoscale materials and have attracted a great deal of attention in recent era of organic electronics because of their controlled synthesis, processing, and tunable properties. As bulk thin films, they have been applied in a range of molecular electronic and optoelectronic devices, in particular organic solar cells (OSC) and hybrid dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC). The main advantage of these conjugated materials is their excellent charge transport properties which are prerequisite for optoelectronic devices.

The search for new materials with good performance as well as the improvement in device fabrication has been a subject of importance. We are currently involved in the synthesis and investi-gation of novel semiconductingoligothiophene-based nanostructures with tunable physical and chemical properties for developing the next generation high-performance organic electronics and solar cells. Novel acceptor-substituted functional oligothiophenes have been synthesized and implemented in vacuum-processed “small molecule” heterojunction solar cells. The synthesis, optical and electronic properties of these materials and their performance in OSCs will be discussed. Important structure-property relationships have been elucidated.

Finally, our approach to functional thiophene-based oligomers and metal complexes which have shown promising results in thin-film n-type TiO2-based, p-type NiO-based, and np-type tandem dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) will be presented.