Engineering Commons^™

Molecular Engineering Strategies For The Design And Synthesis Of New Organic Photovoltaic Materials, Paul J. Homnick

Doctoral Dissertations

Dramatic improvements in organic photovoltaic device efficiency can be obtained by optimizing spectral absorbance and frontier molecular orbital (FMO) energies, increasing solid state exciton/charge mobility, and utilizing p-/n-type nanoarchitecture. Combining all of these properties into a new material presents a considerable synthetic challenge because potential commercial applications require materials that are high-performance and inexpensive. Thus, it is advantageous to design new materials using a versatile, modular synthetic approach that allows each design criterion to be engineered individually, in a synthetically efficient manner. Several strategies were successfully pursued using simple interchangeable electron donor and acceptor components as functional modules, which …