PhD students have received travel grants from Foundation Idella

The interest in Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) has increased substantially over the past years, both nationally and globally, as they are promising candidates for low-cost, flexible and light-weight energy devices. At the SDU NanoSYD center at the University of Southern Denmark, we work on developing several aspect of OPV including: efficiency, stability and large-scale fabrication.

Pawel Piotr Cielecki, PhD student at NanoSYD, has received a travel grant from the Foundation Idella for conducting a collaborative work with the University of Cagliari, which focuses on optical characterization of degradation mechanisms in organic solar cells. This includes using ultrafast optical methods such as: transient absorption spectroscopy and time-resolved photoluminescence to investigate the dynamics of the photo-induced processes at every stage of the charge generation and collection processes to recognize factors that affect them. The research output will result in a deeper understanding of degradation processes, which is a step towards producing stable OPV.

Bhushan Ramesh Patil, also a PhD student at NanoSYD, has received a similar grant from Idella Foundation for visiting the Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany for a research stay. The research stay will be focused on studying changes in morphology of organic solar cells over time using a Scanning Near- field Optical Microscopy (SNOM) technique, in order to investigate performance degradation of OPV. This joint project between the SDU NanoSYD center and the Zhang group at Tübingen, will exploit the superior lateral resolution of SNOM in order to study changes in the morphology of OSCs at the nanoscale, as the technique is capable of resolving the individual nanoscale phases in the organic active layer. The work therefore directly addresses the investigation of degradation processes in OPV over time, which will result in an optimization of stability and lifetime of the devices.