Ally Hurd—a physics undergraduate student at Macalester College—has concluded her REU 2022 Summer internship working with Collins group.  Her work focused on quantifying lifetimes of photo-generated charges in printable organic solar cells (OSCs). That included fabrication of OSCs, characterization and optimization of their device performance. Her charge lifetime experiment, known as transient photovoltage (TPV) measurement, involved light sources such as LEDs, a solar simulator, and nanosecond pulsed wavelength-tunable laser. At the end of the internship, Ally presented her work at the 2022 Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium at Washington State University.

Best wishes, Ally!

Graduate student Victor Murcia has successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “DEVELOPMENT OF TENSOR BASED BUILDING
BLOCK MODELS WITH DENSITY FUNCTIONAL THEORY CALCULATIONS AND CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS FOR A QUANTITATIVE DESCRIPTION OF MOLECULAR ORIENTATION USING NEAR EDGE X-RAY ABSORPTION FINE STRUCTURE SPECTROSCOPY OF SMALL MOLECULES”. For this work, he has been awarded his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering. Congratulations, Victor!

Graduate student Fred Woodall has successfully defended his master’s degree in Physics. His thesis is titled “Characterization and Optimization of Zinc Phthylocyanine Thin Films in Organic Solar Cells”.

Congratulations, Fred!

In collaboration with Ma group, organic solar cell work—led by Awwad Alotaibi and entitled “Electrical edge effect induced photocurrent overestimation in low-light organic photovoltaics”—has been published in Joule.

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In collaboration with Neher group et al., organic solar cell work, entitled “On the Interplay between CT and Singlet Exciton Emission in Organic Solar Cells with Small Driving Force and Its Impact on Voltage Loss”, has been published in Advanced Energy Materials.

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Awwad Alotaibi, Tamanna Khan, Obaid Alqahtani, and Brian Collins all presented at the 2022 MRS Spring Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. Brian has helped as an organizer of the “Symposium SB01—Organic Electronics—Multimodal Characterization and Computation-Driven Material Design and Performance”, also has chaired a few sessions in that symposium. Additionally, Brian presented an oral presentation titled: “Revealing the Impact of Interfacial Structure on Charge Generation and Recombination in Organic Photovoltaics”. Awwad’s presentation is titled: “Accurate Measurements of Charge Generation in Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cells with Overpulse TDCF Charge Extraction”. Tamanna presented here work, which is titled “Controlling Ionic Transport in Conducting Polymers via Chemical Gating”. Obaid’s oral presentation is titled: “Evidence That Sharp Donor-Acceptor Interfaces Suppress Recombination, Allowing for Thick Organic Photovoltaics”. Additionally, Obaid presented a poster, titled as: “Multimodal Characterization of Non-Fullerene Organic Solar Cells Based to Assess the Effectiveness of Solvent Plasticizers”.

Obaid’s work on structure-property relationships in polymer:non-fullerene (NFA) organic solar cells (OSCs) has been published at Small. This work examines the effectiveness of a solvent additive that is commonly used to optimize ink-printed NFA OSCs. The findings show that performance and morphology of NFA OSCs are extremely sensitive to residuals of additive due to high sensitivity of NFA molecules to over-crystallization. The main takeaway of this study is that extreme precision is required when printing NFA OSCs with solvent additives. Alternatively, additive-free methods might be necessarily for successful large-scale printing of NFA OSCs. This work was conducted in collaboration with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing.

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Graduate student Tamanna Khan has graduated with her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering. Her dissertation is titled “CONTROLLING ION TRANSPORT PATHWAYS IN POLYMER MIXED ION/ELECTRON CONDUCTING DEVICES”
Congratulations Tamanna!

Emma Speight, undergraduate senior, presented her thesis project at the WSU Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA). Her poster title was “Dynamics of Ordering of Conductive Polymer Films Printed Under Controlled Airflow”. Emma won one of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Gray Awards, the second-highest award at SURCA.
Congratulations Emma!

Victor and Devin presented at the 2022 APS Meeting in Chicago. Victor presented at session D02: Ultrafast XUV/Soft X-ray Spectroscopy. His talk is entitled “Combining soft X-ray spectroscopy and reflectivity with DFT for optical models of polarized RSoXS to reveal molecular alignment in nanostructures”. Devin presented at session M18: Polymer Structure Formation and Dynamics in Solution. His presentation was entitled “Label-free characterization of aqueous micelle nanostructure and dynamics via in-situ RSoXS”.