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Titania Nanocomposites for Photovoltaic Applications

Devon A. Shipp

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) has been widely examined for use in organic PV devices because it is both an electron acceptor and electron conductor. Most organic or composite PV cells blend or cast electron donor and electron acceptor moieties together into films such that the morphology within the film is disordered. However, photoconversion efficiencies for these devices are often less than a few percent. This is thought to be due to the fact that excitons that are generated upon irradiation are unable to dissociate into electron and holes because they do not diffuse to the phase interface quickly enough before decaying. This project seeks to overcome the difficulty in separation of excitons in heterojunction cells by creating more ordered nanostructures which will allow for separation of the exciton because the diffusion path length exceeds the overall dimension of the semiconductor. Achieving well-ordered TiO2 nanostructures has been problematic due to the high reactivity of the crystalline surfaces. Our work will concentrate on developing the structured TiO2 materials that can be filled with conducting polymer or other conducting materials (such as quantum dots), to form a nanocomposite PV cell. The overall process is given in Scheme 1, and involves the use of poly(styrene-b-4-vinyl pyridine) (PS-b-PVP) to template the deposition of the TiO2 onto a conducting glass substrate.

The REU student will look at varying the molecular weight of the block copolymer segments in order to control the diameter of the cylinders and their center-to-center distance. He/she will examine the effect of solvent annealing to improve long-range ordering in the block copolymer film, in addition to exploring alternative titanium precursors so that the TiO2 nanopillars are more robust. Use of various microscope techniques (e.g. atomic force microscopy, electron microscopy), along with polymer synthesis methods will be involved.

Scheme 1. Approach to form nanostructured materials for PV, and images from each step (a-d).