Aram Amassian, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Career Development SABIC Chair, Solar Photovoltaics and Engineering Research Center, Physical Sciences and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST, Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
The efficiency of organic semiconductors as light harvesting materials in plastic solar cells or charge carrying materials in plastic electronics depends greatly upon the molecular details, including the packing structure, the nanoscale morphology and the energetic landscape at interfaces. As such the manufacturing of solar cells and electronic devices via high throughput printing and coating techniques will require an extraordinary level of control of all aspects of thin film formation, bar none, in order to achieve efficient modules and fast electronics. On the solar cell front, spin-coating is responsible for all record-breaking solution-processed organic solar cells reported thus far, but it is both extremely wasteful and incompatible with roll-to-roll manufacturing. On the electronics front, drop-casting has traditionally been the lab-scale method of choice, but it is plagued by non-uniformity problems.
I will present, first, our current understanding of the solution-to-solid phase transformation process responsible for semiconductor thin film formation in benchmark solution-processing techniques, such as drop-casting, blade-coating and spin-coating. This has been enabled by significant effort over the past 4 years in the development of new in situ metrology strategies. In the case of plastic electronics, the use of the blade-coating process is shown to yield performance far superior to other ones by virtue of different nucleation and growth behaviors of small-molecules which can trump classical nucleation theory in some instances and promise to enable high performance large-area electronics. This benefit is not fully observed in case of polymer systems, requiring further effort on our behalf to understand the performance gap achieved by different solution processes.
Site web du groupe de Prof. Amassian's
Cette conférence est présentée par le RQMP Versant Nord du Département de physique de l'Université de Montréal et le Département de génie physique de Polytechnique Montréal.
