Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Correlating Morphology To Performance In Conjugated Polymer Nanocomposite Thin Films, Siddharth Pradhan

Masters Theses

The morphology and performance of thin films that consist of conjugated polymers and nanoparticles are investigated in this thesis. In the first system, the morphology of the nanocomposite that consists of low band gap alternating copolymers with a methano-fullerene are determined by neutron scattering and correlated to their photovoltaic performance as polymer solar cells. These results show that the conjugated alternating copolymers have high miscibility relative to other conjugated polymers. The analysis of the scattering data shows that the morphology of the conjugated polymer-fullerene bulk heterojunction can be described as the formation of aggregates on two length scales. Important parameters …