Mohammad AL-Amar
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Doctoral Dissertation Announcement
Candidate: Mohammad AL-Amar
Degree of:
Doctor of Philosophy
Department: Physics
Title: Modifying Copper Phthalocyanine to Improve the Performance of Organic Solar Cells
Committee:
Dr. Clement Burns, Chair
Dr. Lisa Paulius
Dr. Asghar Kayani
Dr. Paul D. Fleming
Dr. Nasser Hamdan
Date: Monday, November 7, 2011 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
2202 Everett Tower
Abstract:
Organic materials are of great interest for use as low cost electronic and optoelectronic devices. However, the performance of organic solar cells is inferior to the performance of inorganic solar cells. There are many factors that affect the quality of the organic solar cells performance including the fact that the absorption-spectrum bandwidth of organic materials is narrower than the solar spectrum, and that the absorption of sunlight produces strongly bound electron-hole pairs (excitons). The exciton forms due to the low dielectric constant and the large effective masses.
The aim of this research is to improve the performance of these organic solar cells. In the first part of this work, we try to expand the absorption-spectrum bandwidth for the organic materials in the visible spectrum region by varying the band gap. Different sizes of copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) nanoparticles were synthesized to study a shift in the peak positions as the particles become smaller. In the second part of this work, we try to directly generate free electrons and holes by using organic semiconductor materials with high dielectric constants. Copper phthalocyanine oligomer, which has high dielectric constant, was used as an active layer (donor) in the organic solar cells to allow the exciton to break.
The results show that copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) nanoparticles did not achieve a large shift in the peak positions of the visible spectrum; however, this technique might work for other organic materials. Organic solar cells containing a layer of copper phthalocyanine oligomer show improvement in the life time and stability.