Researchers make organic solar cells immune to the ravages of water, air and light

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/researchers-make-organic-solar-cells-immune-ravages-water-air-and-light

Press Release
Researchers make organic solar cells immune to the ravages of water, air and light
Posted: May 1, 2019

BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, May 1, 2019 – The market for organic solar cells is expected to grow more than 20% between 2017 and 2020, driven by advantages over traditional silicon solar cells: they can be mass produced at scale using roll-to-roll processing; the materials comprising them can be easily found in the earth and could be applied to solar cells through green chemistry; they can be semitransparent and therefore less visually intrusive — meaning they can be mounted on windows or screens and are ideal for mobile devices; they are ultra-flexible and can stretch; and they can be ultra-lightweight.

Unlike silicon solar cells, however, organic cells are highly vulnerable to moisture, oxygen and sunlight itself. State-of-the-art remediation involves incapsulating the cell, which adds to production cost and unit weight, while reducing efficiency.

Researchers at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering have discovered a remarkable means of making organic solar panels more robust, including conferring resistance to oxygen, water and light by doing the opposite: removing, not adding, material.

The team, led by André Taylor, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and including Jaemin Kong, a post-doctoral researcher at NYU, and researchers at Yale University’s Transformative Materials and Devices lab, performed the molecular equivalent of hair removal by waxing: they employed an adhesive tape to strip the electron-accepting molecules — the conjugated fullerene derivative Phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) — from the topmost surface of the photoactive layer of the solar cell, leaving only non-reactive organic polymers exposed. One of the major culprits in device degradation is the oxidation of these fullerene derivatives. Removing PCBM from the exposed film surface reduces the chance of encounters with oxidation sources such as oxygen molecules and water, the latter being especially damaging to PCBM.

…

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.9b00274

[Chin music]

1. Wouldn't it be a sin if all these things broke out into the world and made life easier,...

just as the gop was ruining the country forever. The gop needs to be listed as a terrorist organization. they have ZERO qualms about disturbing the peace and scofflaw'ing it everyday. Sigh. We'd be SO much further ahead if Pres Clinton took her spot.
Trump wants two years replaced? We want Hillaries 8. keep it up loudmouth.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. We'd be so much further ahead if Reagan hadn't beaten Carter

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/april-18-1977-address-nation-energy
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/november-8-1977-address-nation-energy

I hope that, perhaps a hundred years from now, the change to inexhaustible energy sources will have been made, and our Nation's concern about energy will be over. But we can make that transition smoothly—for our country and for our children and for our grandchildren—only if we take careful steps now to prepare ourselves for the future.

[Chin music]

3. As the song goes, "Yes, I remember it well."

I'd like to hear more from Jimbo. God I miss Ted Kennedy, John Jr., JFK. Bobby. What a wonderful world it would've been.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Ironically, in the song, his memory is faulty

HONOR: We met at nine
GRANDMAMA: We met at eight
HONOR: I was on time
GRANDMAMA: No, you were late
HONOR: Ah yes, I remember it well
We dined with friends
GRANDMAMA: We dined alone
HONOR: A tenor sang
GRANDMAMA: A baritone
HONOR:I remember it well

[Chin music]

7. +1

[NNadir]

5. We can whine all we want about pretending to care about our grandchildren...

...but the fact is that the solar fantasy simply didn't work, doesn't work and won't work.

All the bullshit repetition of lab scale "breakthroughs" over decades and decades have done nothing at all..

Trillions of dollars have been squandered on this unsustainable mass intensive and environmentally worthless "solar will save us" scheme since Reagan died, and we're at 415 ppm of CO2.

Beat the ghost to death, if you wish, but the laws of physics have a lot more to do with this than a senile old boogeyman in the White House in the 1980's.

If people really gave a shit about their Grandchildren and their children they wouldn't be dumping, with contempt, the responsibility to do "by 2050" what they have been unable and unwilling to do themselves.

It is obscene to talk about one's grandchildren in this context, since this big lie is abandoning their future.

[NNadir]

6. Let's bet the planetary atmosphere on a horrible chemical process involving indium and vanadium...

...and chlorobenzene.

From the open sourced supplementary information from the paper, if they were willing to give enough of a fuck to really dump this stuff on future generations:

ACS Energy Lett., 2019, 4, pp 1034–1041, supplementary information:

It's um "organic..."

Materials and solution preparation: P3HT was purchased from Rieke Metals, and PCBM and PC71BM were purchased from Nano-C, respectively. PBDB-T, and IT-M were purchased from Brilliant Matters. All chemical reagents and solvents were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich. The purchased materials, reagents and chemicals were used as received. For the preparation of the photoactive blend solutions with P3HT and PCBM, two materials were mixed one to one by weight and they were dissolved in chlorobenzene (anhydrous, 99.8%) with 3 vol% of solvent additive, diphenyl ether (99%) to obtain a total concentration of 50 mg mL-1. For PBDB-T: IT-M solution, 8 mg of PBDB-T and 8 mg of IT-M were dissolved in 1 mL of chlorobenzene with 10?L of 1,8-diiodooctane. All solutions were stirred on the hot plate stirrers at 60 °C for 24 hours before being used. For the electron transporting layer, the ZnO sol-gel precursor was prepared by dissolving zinc acetate dihydrate (99.9%) and ethanolamine (99.5%) in isopropyl alcohol (99.8%). For the hole transporting material, vanadium oxide sol-gel precursor stock solution was first prepared by diluting 40 ?L of vanadium (V) oxytriisopropoxide with 2 mL of isopropyl alcohol, and then the stock was diluted again with isopropyl alcohol to a concentration of 0.33 % by volume.1
Device fabrication: Indium tin oxide (ITO) (L × W × thickness = 1.5 cm × 1.0 cm × 100 nm) sputtered glass substrates (L × W × thickness = 1.5 cm × 1.5 cm × 1 mm) were ultra-sonicated in deionized water, acetone and isopropyl alcohol for 10 minutes, respectively, and were stored in a drying oven at 100 °C before being used. The ZnO layer was deposited by spin coating the ZnO sol-gel precursor solution onto the cleaned substrates at 5000 rpm for 30 seconds and then the ZnO coated substrates were dried at 150 °C on a hot plate for 30 min in air to form a 20-nm thick electron transporting layer. After the drying, the ZnO coated substrates were transferred into a N2-filled glove box. The photoactive layers were formed on the ZnO coated substrates by spincoating...

the photoactive blending solutions. Spinning rates of the spin coater are 800 rpm and 1500 rpm for P3HT: PCBM and PBDB-T: IT-M, respectively. And then the active layer coated substrates were put onto a hotplate at 140 °C for 10 minutes. After coating the photoactive layers, vanadium oxide layer was coated on the photoactive layer (3000 rpm for 30 s) in air. Then, the substrates were moved to hot plate to dry the vanadium oxide layer at 80 °C for 10 min. To have the surface PCBM removed blend film, a rubber roller was used. After the thermal annealing in N2 glove box, the blend film coated substrates were moved out to air and the adhesive tape (model #: S-9782) was placed onto the blend film surface. The tape attached substrates were moved onto the hotplate set for 100 °C, and were softly pressed by rolling a rubber roller 5 times back and forth (~500 Pa). For the PBDB-T: IT-M, much less pressure was exerted onto the substrate (~200 Pa). Then, the substrates were moved out to a working bench to cool down the substrates for 10 min. After cooling down the substrates, the tapes attached onto the surface of the blend films were gently removed. After removal of the tape, vanadium oxide layer was formed in the same way as aforementioned. Finally, silver electrodes were deposited using a thermal evaporator at ~5×10-7 Torr. For the PBDB-T: IT-M solar cell, MoO3 (5 nm) layer was deposited prior to the silver electrode in the same vacuum chamber. A patterned shadow mask was used to define the top electrode area. The device active area was determined by the intersectional area of the bottom ITO and the top silver electrode, which is 1.8 mm2. For the electron-only device, the device structure was based on ITO/ZnO/P3HT: PCBM/ZnO/Al. For the hole-only device, the device structure was based on ITO/PEDOT: PSS/P3HT: PCBM/V2O5/Ag. For the flexible OSCs, ITO sputtered PET substrates (100 ?/sq, 5 mil) which have the same size of the ITO sputtered glass substrates were used with the following device structure: PET/ITO/ZnO/(P3HT : PCBM or PBDB-T: IT-M)/(V2O5 or MoO3)/Ag
.

The full paper is amusing, and can be found here: Underwater Organic Solar Cells via Selective Removal of Electron Acceptors near the Top Electrode (Kim et al ACS Energy Lett., 2019, 4, pp 1034–1041.)

I've downloaded it in full to remind myself how little we actually care; how willing we're able to embrace a toxic illusion.

I'm sure our grandchildren will be awash in indium tin oxide, vanadium oxide, aluminum and molybdenum trioxide for their "green" "organic" solar cells, or maybe not.

Maybe they'll hate our guts for screwing them over with our cartoonish delusions.