EAPSI:The Study of Novel Liquid Crystal Structures for use in Organic Solar Cell Technologies

太阳能电池代表了一种很有前途的技术，以取代化石燃料，由于丰富的能源，太阳能提供给地球？我们每天都在水面上。工业太阳能电池目前使用的无机材料比有机材料有一些优势;主要是前者比后者更有效。然而，无机材料也是昂贵的、不灵活的和笨重的，并且限于相对小面积的器件。新型有机材料可用于克服当前太阳能电池技术的成本和制造限制。 一种独特的有机物质？一种叫做螺旋纳米丝的液晶结构将研究其在太阳能电池设备中的潜在有效性。这项工作将在韩国KAIST与世界领先的液晶取向技术专家Dong Ki Yoon教授一起进行。液晶已被观察到具有优异的有机半导体特性，使其成为有机光致发光的良好候选者。此外，它已被证明，弯曲的核心液晶，形成？就像一把双刃剑？螺旋纳米丝可以使用各种技术排列，包括对流冷却、衬底表面能改性和纳米限制。这提供了对齐这些细丝的能力，以及含有第二个？客人？在光伏器件内，相对容易地使用材料，潜在地导致器件内更有效的激子分裂和电荷传输。首先将研究用于光子学的螺旋纳米丝，将它们放置在有机场效应晶体管器件内以提取正交方向上的电荷载流子迁移率，该奖项是东亚和太平洋夏季研究所计划下的一个奖项，支持美国研究生的夏季研究，由NSF和美国国家科学基金会共同资助。韩国研究基金会。

Solar cells represent a promising technology to replace fossil fuels due to the abundance of energy the sun provides to the Earth?s surface every day. Industrial solar cells currently use inorganic materials which have some advantages over organic materials; primarily the former are more efficient than the latter. However, inorganic materials are also expensive, inflexible and bulky, and are restricted to relatively small area devices. Novel organic materials can be used to overcome the cost and manufacturing limitations of current solar cell technologies. One unique organic material?a liquid crystal structure called a helical nanofilament?will be studied for its potential effectiveness in solar cell devices. This work will be conducted at KAIST in Korea with Professor Dong Ki Yoon, a world-leading expert in liquid crystal alignment techniques.Liquid crystals have been observed to have excellent organic semiconducting properties, making them a good candidate for use in organic photovoltaics. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that bent core liquid crystals that form ?nanowire-like? helical nanofilaments can be aligned using various techniques including convection cooling, substrate surface energy modification, and nano-confinement. This offers the ability to align these filaments, and composites containing a second ?guest? material, within photovoltaic devices with relative ease, potentially leading to more efficient exciton splitting and charge transport within devices. A first look at helical nanofilaments for use in photovoltaics will be studied by placing them within an organic field effect transistor device to extract charge carrier mobility in orthogonal directions, giving insight to the efficacy of aligned helical nanofilaments in photovoltaic devices.This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the National Research Foundation of Korea.