materialsscienceandengineering:
Organic Photovoltaic Material Offers Great Promise for Solar Energy
Scientists at MIT believe modeling electron excitation in organic photovoltaic material could change the future of solar energy.
The semi-conducting plastic is lightweight, flexible, relatively inexpensive, and easy to make. The problem is that, unlike inorganic photovoltaic material, it is not very efficient or stable. But work by Adam Willard, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at MIT, has the potential to change that.
Willard is a theoretical chemist who uses modeling and simulation to study molecular systems. The goal of his research group is to explore and understand the fundamentals and consequences of molecular disorder — which lies at the heart of the challenge posed by organic photovoltaic material.
While organic photovoltaic films may appear smooth and homogeneous to the naked eye, they are extremely disordered at the molecular scale, where they appear as a giant tangle of unaligned molecules. That tangle makes it difficult to understand how electrons, when excited by photons, could more easily travel through the structure and reach an external electrode. Even understanding the behavior of a single electron is a challenge.
Hopefully this can get into the market sooner rather than later.
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