November Marks the First Progress Meeting

The Midterm-Check meeting of the OPVStability project will take place in Trieste from November 25th to 29th. This event offers a valuable opportunity for partners, supervisors, and students to update each other on the progress of their research. It will also include training sessions on using synchrotron light, how to prepare formal presentations of your research, and how to share your findings to the public via social media.

Five days of training, discussions, and idea exchanges—this is what's in store for the first progress meeting of the project "Understanding, Predicting, and Enhancing the Stability of Organic Photovoltaics."

Funded by the European Union, OPVStability aims to lay the groundwork for a new generation of organic photovoltaic cells. While organic photovoltaics are now competitive with traditional silicon-based cells in terms of performance, flexibility, and ease of production, their rapid degradation still poses a significant barrier to widespread adoption.

Ten PhD students have been recruited by the project to gather extensive data on this challenging issue and to begin experimenting with new possible combinations of materials and/or cell architectures that could enhance durability.

The first meeting among project participants took place last April in at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. This coming November, CERIC will host the Project Midterm Check, focused on the project's progress, in its headquarters located at Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste.

The event will feature formal sessions (meetings with supervisors, the European Project Officer, and the Supervisor Board assembly) and training sessions on synchrotron light, the instruments available for research thanks to the project partners, particularly TU Graz and CERIC, who have part of their equipment at Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, as well as soft skills such as presenting research projects to other scientists or the general public through social media.

The official agenda will be made available in the coming weeks via email and on this website.

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Kicking Off the OPV Stability Project

The OPV Stability Project's kick-off meeting took place in Erlangen, Germany, from April 8th to 11th. Partners, supervisors, and PhD students convened to deliberate on the Project's forthcoming steps and commence the initial training sessions.

Organic solar cells represent a promising avenue for the production of emission-free electricity: compared to silicon cells, they are lighter, thinner, and possess enhanced flexibility, all while maintaining good power conversion efficiency. Nonetheless, the swiftness of their degradation remains a formidable impediment to widespread adoption. Hence, the key question is: how can we prolong the lifespan of organic photovoltaics? Ten PhD students will undertake this challenge over the next four years of the Project.
A training program and individualized career guidance have been instituted to delve deeper into the evolution of these technologies and pinpoint stable motifs, materials, and architectures. The gathering in Erlangen marked the initial stride in this important journey.

The meeting started with presentations from participating universities, industrial entities, and research facilities, fostering an interdisciplinary milieu that encouraged students to contemplate science while acknowledging the potential economic ramifications of their research endeavours. Subsequently, PhD candidates engaged in one-on-one discussions with supervisors to delineate their work agendas and commence training sessions.
The first one was a comprehensive "Introduction into OPV," laying a robust foundational understanding of the technology. This was seamlessly followed by an extensive overview of photovoltaics and its pivotal role in transforming energy systems.The Meeting highlights  included lab visits of i-Meet and Hi-Ern, providing firsthand exposure to cutting-edge equipment utilized in OPV research. Furthermore, participants had the privilege to explore OPV production during a visit to Energie Campus Nurnberg, gaining valuable insights into practical applications.

A workshop focusing on "Big Data, statistics, data mining, and machine learning" further equipped the DCs with analytical tools indispensable for effective data interpretation, thus augmenting their capabilities in OPV research and development. In sum, these activities facilitated a comprehensive and enriching learning experience, nurturing collaboration and fostering innovation among all participants.

The OPV Stability Project presents a novel comprehensive strategy that includes high-throughput experiments and artificial intelligence methods to set the path for the next generation of OPVs. As the project coordinator, Gregor Trimmel, from the Institute for Chemistry and Technology of Materials at TU Graz, remarked: “High efficiency, low costs and long lifetimes are essential qualities for every solar cell technology. OPVs have already shown that they can compete in the first two factors, as their efficiencies are approaching 20% with a very low cost of production. However, OPVs still lag in stability. Within OPVStability, we focus on this very key issue, and I am confident that we will make a significant contribution to the further advancement of this technology.”

Partners of the project are Technical University Graz, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Paul Drude Institute  - Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V., Karlstad University, Central European Research Infrastructure Consortium, University of Bayreuth, Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen - Nürnberg, University of Southern Denmark as well as the associated partners InfinityPV, ASCA GmbH, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Sunbooster GmbH, Zentrum für Elektronenmikroskopie, and University of Potsdam.