Seminar : Eco-friendly Fabrication of Organic Solar Cells

Alexander COLSMANN (Material Research Center for Energy Systems, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), will give a talk thursday 7th december 2017, à 2:00pm in room A302 of the pole API building in Illkirch.

Title : Eco-friendly Fabrication of Organic Solar Cells

Abstract : Future solar cells will be fabricated on mechanically flexible and light weight carriers, addressing the requirements of architectural design or mobile applications. They will come with arbitrary shapes and colors or even be semi-transparent, opening up avenues to new markets, e.g., for truly transparent photovoltaics in buildings and automotive applications. And future solar cells may be organic, fabricated entirely from eco-friendly and sustainable processes, yielding unsurpassed low energy payback times. The industrial fabrication of organic solar cells is often hampered by toxic solvents that require strong safety precautions. Whereas the use of chlorinated solvents or toxic hydrocarbons is feasible in the lab, their use in large scale printing processes would lead to enormous operational costs, which conflicts with the goal of cost efficient production. In this work, efficient organic solar cells are presented that were fabricated from non-halogenated solvents. To advance this concept and to enable device fabrication from non-toxic solvents, organic semiconductor nanoparticles are dispersed in environmentally friendly agents such as ethanol. In an inverted device architecture, the power conversion efficiency of the solar cells matches the performance of reference devices that were fabricated from dichlorobenzene.

Bio : Alexander Colsmann studied physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, where he received his diploma in 2003. In 2008 he was awarded his PhD for his thesis “Charge carrier transport layers for efficient organic semiconductor devices” by the University of Karlsruhe (TH). Since then he has been leading the organic photovoltaics research group at the Light Technology Institute at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In 2016, he accomplished his Habilitation. He is member of the board of directors at the Material Research Center for Energy Systems at KIT and spokesperson for Renewable Energies within the KIT Energy Center. Further research interests include semi-transparent solar cells for building integration, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), printed electronics, polymer electrodes, charge carrier transport layers, electrical doping of organic semiconductors, copper indium diselenide (CIS) and perovskite solar cells.