The research progress of the past ten years in the field of organic and hybrid photovoltaics is marked by important breakthroughs towards their use for a sustainable future. Relentless research endeavours helped to achieve high efficiencies in outdoor and indoor environments. This potential is now underpinned by impressive laboratory-scale efficiencies, for example 18% for organic solar cells and > 25% for perovskites, achieved by sophisticated molecular engineering and a deep understanding of charge generation and voltage loss mechanisms. Thus it is now time to drive these technologies into market adoption and to consider ‘application targets’ such as indoor light-harvesting for internet of things (IoT) or space solar cells, that are opportune platforms to enable adoption. This symposium endeavours to gather leading experts in academia and industries from around the world aiming to identify and describe application targets for next-generation photovoltaic devices. In this regard, the symposium will particularly focus on areas such as state-of-the-art materials for photoactive layers and ancillary components, new material processing and device fabrication techniques, device engineering, characterization and simulation, differences in device physics between standard solar illumination, and more bespoke conditions such as indoor lighting, and cost evaluation of technologically relevant ‘whole systems’.
- Light-weight, high power density PV for communications/aerospace-related technologies
- Stability testing of perovskites and organic solar cells
- Scaling of organic and perovskite solar cells for large-area devices
- Semi-transparent solar cells and building integration of PV technologies
- Indoor PV for Internet of Things (IoT)
- PV-battery integration and system architectures
- Printable solar cells and environmentally friendly manufacturing
- PV cost and life cycle analysis
Prof. Marina Freitag is a Professor of Energy and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Newcastle University. She is developing new light-driven technologies that incorporate coordination polymers to solve the most important challenges in the research area, including issues of sustainability, stability and performance of hybrid PV. The development of such highly innovative concepts has given Marina international recognition, including recipient of the prestigious 2022 Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize 2022.
Her research into hybrid molecular devices, began during her doctoral studies (2007-2011, Rutgers University, NJ, USA) where she was awarded an Electrochemical Society Travel Award and Dean Dissertation Fellowship 2011. Dr Freitag moved to Uppsala University (2013-2015) for a postdoctoral research position, which focused on the implementation of alternative redox mediators, leading to a breakthrough today known as “zombie solar cells”. Dr Freitag was invited to further develop this work at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with Prof. Anders Hagfeldt ( 2015-2016). From 2016-2020 she was appointed as Assistant Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she received the Göran Gustaffsson Young Researcher Award 2019.
Dr. Clara Aranda Alonso, received her doctorate degree in Science from University Jaume I in 2019 at the Institute of Advanced Materials (INAM) (Castellón, Spain). She worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Forschungszentrum Jülich and Institute for Photovoltaics (ipv) at the University of Stuttgart (Germany) for two years. Then she moved to the Institute of Materials Science (ICMUV) at the University of Valencia (Spain) as a Margarita Salas fellow. Currently, she is working at Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville (Spain). Her work is focused on the synthesis and characterization of wide band gap perovskite materials, both in thin film and single crystal configuration, for photoconversion devices such as solar cells, photodetectors and memristors, using impedance spectroscopy as the main characterization tool.
René Janssen is university professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from the TU/e for a thesis on electron spin resonance and quantum chemical calculations of organic radicals in single crystals. He was lecturer at the TU/e since 1984, and a senior lecturer in physical organic chemistry since 1991. In 1993 and 1994 he joined the group of Professor Alan J. Heeger (Nobel laureate in 2000) at the University of California Santa Barbara as associate researcher to work on the photophysical properties of conjugated polymers. Presently the research of his group focuses on functional conjugated molecules and macromolecules as well as hybrid semiconductor materials that may find application in advanced technological applications. The synthesis of new materials is combined with time-resolved optical spectroscopy, electrochemistry, morphological characterization and the preparation of prototype devices to accomplish these goals. René Janssen has co-authored more than 600 scientific papers. He is co-recipient of the René Descartes Prize from the European Commission for outstanding collaborative research, and received the Research Prize of The Royal Institute of Engineers and in The Netherlands for his work. In 2015 René Janssen was awarded with the Spinoza Prize of The Dutch Research Council.
Jenny Nelson is a Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, where she has researched novel varieties of material for use in solar cells since 1989. Her current research is focussed on understanding the properties of molecular semiconductor materials and their application to organic solar cells. This work combines fundamental electrical, spectroscopic and structural studies of molecular electronic materials with numerical modelling and device studies, with the aim of optimising the performance of plastic solar cells. She has published around 200 articles in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters and a book on the physics of solar cells.
Dr. Monika Rai is a senior researcher and group leader at IMO-IMOMEC, University of Hasselt, Belgium. She received her doctoral degree from the Banaras Hindu University (BHU), India in 2017. Before she joined IMOMEC, she worked as an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the University of Stuttgart from 2021 to 2022, and a post doctoral fellow at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore from 2017 to 2021. She was also a Visiting Researcher at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel in 2018. Dr. Monika Rai has worked on different projects including perovskite solar cells and modules, transparent conducting oxides and printing technologies with expertise in solar cell devices and their optoelectronic characterizations. Her current research interests include strectchable electronics and energy harvesting devices.
Tao Wang is Professor of Materials Science in the School of Materials Science & Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, China. He received his B.S. in Polymer Materials and Engineering (2002) and M.Sc. in Materials Science (2005). He obtained his Ph.D. in Soft Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Surrey (UK) in Feb. 2009. Subsequently, he moved to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield (UK), where he worked with Prof. Richard Jones (FRS) and Prof. David Lidzey on organic solar cells. He became a professor in Wuhan University of Technology (China) in 2014. He is admitted as Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry in 2019, and is an Editoral Board Member of Reports on Progress in Physics. His current research interests are organic and hybrid optoelectronic devices. He has published over 100 journal papers in Joule, Advanced Materials, Advanced Energy Materials and so on.