| Azaraimy HH |
EFFORTS in discovering alternative fuel and energy are intensifying as the issues attributed to global warming are becoming increasingly critical. Energy from the Sun is the obvious alternative, said Professor Jae-Jung Ko, Professor of Chemistry from the Department of Advanced Materials Chemistry, Korea University, in a lecture on the latest developments in the field of solar cell research yesterday at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD).
The lecture was organised by the Centre for Advanced Materials and Energy Sciences, UBD, at the Institute for Leadership, Innovation & Advancement (ILIA).
Professor Jae-Jung Ko spoke on the research trends in developing high-efficiency and low-cost solar cells.
The developments of three types of low-cost thin-film solar cells which were dye-sensitised solar cell, organic solar cell and perovskite based solar cell were discussed.
The speaker also discussed about the process of selecting new advanced materials to replace the more expensive materials such as the substitution of larger organic molecules with smaller ones which are more reproducible with a drop in the cell performance. The speaker’s research group has successfully synthesised many efficient small molecules by making only slight structural modifications to the organic sensitisers.
Recently, perovskite-based solar cells have attracted great interest due to its high efficiency and stability, reaching a record of 17 per cent efficiency in only three years of development. In these solar cells, high cost spiro-OMeTAD is used as the typical hole transporting material (HTM). The speaker highlighted the progress made by his research group in developing alternative low-cost HTM as a substitute to spiro-OMeTAD. The concept of synthesising small molecules of the HTM with organic sensitisers was also discussed.