Organic Photovoltaics

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) is one of the emerging energy harvesting technologies owing to their low-cost fabrication, semitransparency, flexibility and solution processability among other advantages. In recent years, concerted efforts in developing new organic semiconductors, especially non-fullerene acceptors (NFAs), combined with advancement in device engineering have propelled the power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) >18%. Our research subgroup working in the area of OPVs has three-fold interests. 

  1. Probing the role of charge transfer and resonance energy transfer (RET) in high efficiency blends using steady state and transient spectroscopic techniques.
  2. In order to push the PCE of the OPVs further, ternary blend systems utilizing novel NFAs are also designed and studied to counter the limited absorption range of organic semiconductors as well as to facilitate exciton dissociation and charge collection.
  3. Our recent advents into the regime of semi-transparent OPVs aim to better understand design parameters and device physics for building integrated photovoltaic applications. 

 In addition, our research subgroup focuses in synthesizing new hole and electron transporting materials that can be employed in organic/perovskite solar cells.

Representative Publications:

  • Yaping Zang, Suman Ray, E-Dean Fung, Anders Borges, Marc H Garner, Michael L Steigerwald, Gemma C Solomon, Satish Patil and Latha Venkataraman, Resonant Transport in Single Diketopyrrolopyrrole Junctions, J. Am.Chem. Soc. 2018, 140 (41), 13167–13170.
  •  AA Mohapatra, Y Dong, P Boregowda, A Mohanty, A Sadhanala, X Jiao, Rational Design of Donor–Acceptor Based Semiconducting Copolymers with High Dielectric Constants, The Journal of Physical Chemistry C 125 (12), 6886-6896
  • AA Mohapatra, V Tiwari, S Patil, Energy transfer in ternary blend organic solar cells: recent insights and future directions, Energy & Environmental Science 14 (1), 302-319
  • C. Kanimozhi, N. Y. Gross, K. W. Chou, A. Amassian, T. D. Anthopoulos and and S.Patil, Diketopyrrolopyrrole-Diketopyrrolopyrrole-based Conjugated Copolymer for High-Mobility Organic Field-Effect Transistors, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 16532.
  • Tushita Mukhopadhyay, Boregowda Puttaraju, Satyaprasad P. Senanayak, Aditya Sadhanala, Richard Friend, Hendrik A. Faber, Thomas D. Anthopoulos, Ulrike Salzner, Andreas Meyer, and Satish Patil*, Air-Stable n-channel Diketopyrrolopyrrole−Diketopyrrolopyrrole Oligomers for High Performance Ambipolar Organic Transistors, ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, 2016, 38, 25415–25427