Thin Film Solar Cells. New Organic Materials, Large-scale Printing and Nanoparticles

Scott Watkins is the Stream Leader for Thin Film Photovoltaics in CSIRO’s Future Manufacturing Flagship and is based in the Division of Materials Science and Engineering, Melbourne, Victoria. Scott has a PhD in Chemistry from UNSW and has developed research interests which span the synthesis and analysis of new materials through to the fabrication and testing of devices. Between 2000 and 2004 Scott worked with Cambridge Display Technologies in the UK on the development of light-emitting polymers and metal complexes for display and lighting applications. Scott joined CSIRO in 2004 to work on materials and applications in the field of flexible electronics. At CSIRO Scott has led projects on both OLEDs and OPVs and coordinates CSIRO’s involvement in a number of national and international consortia aimed at developing applications of flexible electronics by linking industry with research. Scott is representing CSIRO in the newly formed Australia-US Institute for Advanced Photovoltaics (AUSIAPV), of which Georgia Institute of Technology is a partner.Presented on Wednesday August 21, 2013 from 11:00 am - 12:00 pm in the Molecular Science and Engineering Building room 3201A.Runtime: 58:41 minutes.In this seminar I will present three main areas of our work on solution processed solar cells. In part one I will describe the development of new donor and acceptor materials for solution processed organic photovoltaics (OPVs). In particular, I will discuss the issue of molecular association with regards to small molecule donor materials and its effect on the open circuit voltage. I will also introduce a new class of small molecule semiconductors based on solubilised indene derivatives and their use as acceptor materials in solution processed bulk heterojunction OPVs. In part two, I will describe our work on large scale printing of organic solar cells. Finally, in part three, I will present our work on the fabrication of thin film solar cells based on nanocrystal inks of CdTe. We have shown that totally solution processable solar cells can be fabricated in air at temperatures as low as 300 °C. Focusing on a CdTe/ZnO thin-film system, we report solar cells that achieve power conversion efficiencies of upto 10% with greater than 90% internal quantum efficiency