Advancing sustainable organic photovoltaics: from experiments and materials to applications and device models

As per the recently approved European Green Deal, electricity supply models must transition toward decarbonized and sustainable energy harvesting technologies. Printed electronics energy solutions such as organic photovoltaics (OPV) are promising to maximize the energy return on investment at lower cost and with uncompromised sustainability.

Scope:

The present symposium gathers the latest breakthrough advances in printed OPV toward its greener production, improved performance and stability, to ultimately foster its industrialization and mass adoption by the civil society. Accordingly, the introduction of novel organic light harvesting materials with high performance and facile synthesis will be of utmost importance together with the improved understanding of their device physics and photophysics supported by experiments and simulation approaches. On the other hand, advances in ambient processing of sustainable OPV devices from non-halogenated solvents (including both active layer and interlayer ink formulations) are warmly welcome in this symposium to bridge the lab-to-fab gap. Special attention will be raised to all-printed device layouts where scarce materials such as indium (as part of the workhorse indium tin oxide) are replaced by sustainable alternatives with uncompromised device performance. Resources- and cost-efficient high-throughput experimentation approaches in which humans, robots and/or artificial intelligence are orchestrated in a single workflow will be covered as a more sustainable and convenient route toward accelerated OPV research providing predictive capability. Breakthrough strategies to improve the understanding and enhance the device stability are also key to advance printed OPV to competitive market entry thresholds in terms of cost per watt peak, and they will be accordingly revisited in this symposium. Finally, models and applications of OPV in indoor and outdoor building-integrated form factors (internet-of-things sensors, smart windows, agrivoltaics) will be presented. In this regard, the symposium welcomes novel device structures such as fully organic and hybrid (OPV/perovskite, OPV/silicon) tandem layouts.

Hot topics to be covered by the symposium:

• Novel light harvesting materials development
• Device physics and photophysics
• Theory and novel simulation approaches
• Air processing of sustainable OPV via green solvents
• High-throughput experimentation and machine-learning for materials discovery
• Device photo- and thermal stability enhancements
• Building-integrated OPV: indoors, smart windows, agrivoltaics
• Novel device structures (OPV tandems, OPV/perovskite, OPV/silicon)

Tentative list of invited speakers:

Speakers are proposed due to their strong impact on the current developments in the organic photovoltaic (OPV) field while keeping in mind the equal representation among scientific disciplines, location and gender of the researchers. List of confirmed speakers and tentative title (if provided by the own speaker):

• H. Ade (North Carolina State University, “Challenges and Opportunities of OPV Integration into Greenhouses”)
• D. Baran (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, “Towards sustainable printing of organic electronics with green solvents”)
• C. J. Brabec (FAU Erlangen Nürnberg & HI ERN, TBA)
• M. Campoy-Quiles (Materials Science Institute of Barcelona, TBA)
• G. Frey (Israel Institute of Technology, “Using selective staining and electron microscopy to follow bulk heterojunction morphology”)
• R. Hatton (University of Warwick, “High Performance Flexible Transparent Metal Grid Electrodes for Organic Photovoltaics”)
• J. Hou (Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, TBA)
• T. Kirchartz (Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH and University of Duisburg-Essen, “Disorder and Recombination in Organic Solar Cells”)
• F. Laquai (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, TBA)
• M. A. Loi (University of Groningen, “SnO2 for High-Performance and stable Organic Solar Cells”)
• J. Nelson (Imperial College London, TBA)
• T.-Q. Nguyen (University of California, Santa Barbara, “Additive-Free Organic Solar Cells Processed from Environmental Friendly Solvents”)
• J. Panidi (Imperial College London, “Biorenewable Solvents for Organic Photovoltaics”)
• S. Shohaee (University of Potsdam, “Going after the triplet excitons; can they explain the Voc ?”)
• E. Wang (Chalmers University of Technology, “Molecular Design for High Efficiency Organic Solar Cells”)
• H.-L. Yip (City University of Hong Kong, “Optical Design for Transparent and Tandem Organic Solar Cells”)