CBE Colloquia - Exploration of High-Performance and Low-Cost Organic Photovoltaic Materials
Supporting the below United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:支持以下聯合國可持續發展目標：支持以下联合国可持续发展目标：
Organic Solar Cells (OSCs) represent a new type of photovoltaic technology with significant commercial prospects. In recent years, thanks to the development of non-fullerene acceptors and advancements in active layer morphology control strategies, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of OSCs has continuously achieved breakthroughs. Currently, both single-junction and tandem OSC devices have exceeded 21% in PCE. However, OSCs still face several challenges, such as slow industrialization progress, unclear application prospects, low performance of large-area modules, and a lack of high-performance materials suitable for scalable synthesis. To address these challenges, our research team is committed to developing low-cost donor/acceptor materials with simple structures and using these materials to fabricate high-efficiency devices.
Through precise regulation of electronic structures and aggregated structures, we have successfully developed multiple high-performance and low-cost donor/acceptor material systems with simple structures. Notably, these systems do not rely on complex fused-ring units but are solely based on the most fundamental monocyclic aromatic structural units such as thiophene and benzene. Our work has repeatedly set efficiency records for polythiophene solar cells, developed high-performance polymer donor materials that can be prepared at the 100-gram scale, and achieved efficiency breakthroughs for non-fused-ring electron acceptors and pentacyclic fused-ring acceptors. Additionally, we have fabricated organic solar cells with the highest figure-of-merit and semi-transparent organic photovoltaic devices with the highest light utilization efficiency.
Furthermore, we have developed organic semiconductor materials whose spectral response range extends to 1300 nm, and fabricated short-wave infrared organic photodetectors with an external quantum efficiency (EQE) exceeding 40% below the silicon bandgap. This work has expanded the application directions of organic photovoltaic materials.
Chunhui Duan is a full professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology. He obtained his bachelor's degree from Dalian University of Technology in 2008 and his doctoral degree from South China University of Technology in 2013. Subsequently, he conducted postdoctoral research at Eindhoven University of Technology. Since July 2017, he has served as a full professor at South China University of Technology. Professor Duan's main research focuses on organic optoelectronic materials and devices, with a particular emphasis on the development of high-performance organic solar cells and near-infrared photodetectors through innovative material design. He has published more than 150 papers in top international academic journals, including Chemical Society Reviews, Nature Communications, Chem, Joule, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Advanced Materials, and Energy & Environmental Science. His papers have been cited more than 8,000 times by others, with an H-index of 49, and 21 of his papers have been selected as ESI Highly Cited Papers.