Advanced Organic Materials for Photovoltaic Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Organic materials find a wide variety of applications, particularly in electro-optical devices such as organic light-emitting diodes, organic photovoltaics, organic thin-film transistors, etc. To fulfill the demand for energy, photovoltaics is the topmost choice among renewable energy sources. Organic materials have been researched for their applications in photovoltaics for the past three decades due to their cost effectiveness, facile functional tuning by chemical modification, easy processability, robustness, and flexibility. In recent years, several strategies have been demonstrated to develop new efficient organic materials in particular, to improve the short-circuit current density, open-circuit voltage, and fill factor of the device. Device efficiency and stability are the two crucial factors addressed in recent years.

Since organic materials can be fine-tuned by chemical modification to meet the functional requirements of the devices, remarkable attempts have been made to develop new materials with chemical and functional flexibility. Widening the absorption window and increasing the charge transporting capability are addressed in most synthetic endeavors. Designing low-bandgap organic materials to harvest infrared photons is a challenging area. Several strategies, such as extension of π-conjugation, introduction of quinoid structure, effective use of donor-acceptor molecular configuration, enabling of intra- and inter-molecular charge transfer, etc., are explored.

This Special Issue will provide a platform to showcase recent developments in the field of organic photovoltaics. Organic materials are often used as sensitizers in dye-sensitized solar cells, light-harvesting donor and acceptor fragments in bulk heterojunction solar cells, and hole-transporting molecules in perovskite solar cells. The articles presented in this Special Issue will cover various topics, ranging from organic materials synthesis to characterization and application in organic photovoltaics. The Special Issue is open to articles covering physical insights into organic materials as applied in photovoltaics and their device physics.

Prof. Dr. K. R. Justin Thomas
Prof. Dr. Sambandam Anandan
Guest Editors

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