Spontaneous polarization and inversion symmetry breaking in ferroelectric materials lead to their use as photovoltaic devices. However, further advancement of their applications are hindered by the paucity of ways of reducing bandgaps and enhancing photocurrent. By unravelling the correlation between ferroelectric materials' responses to solar irradiation and their local structure and electric ...

The underlying principles of photovoltaic energy conversion are brie&y reviewed, with particular reference to solar application. Although most photovoltaic converters to date have been based on semiconductor p–n junctions, more general structures and materials are feasible. The fundamental requirements for photovoltaic conversion are discussed, as is a generic approach for analysing the limitin...

Semiconductor devices with enhanced efficiency, resilience, and/or optimized to specific applications/environments rely increasingly on the incorporation of III-V random alloys that have been engineered to possess certain required optoelectronic properties. When these materials are grown, however, challenges with non-random elemental arrangements can greatly affect – and in some cases eliminate...

The efficiency of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has been improved from 9.7 to 19.3%, with the highest value of 20.1% achieved in 2014. Such a high photovoltaic performance can be attributed to optically high absorption characteristics and balanced charge transport properties with long diffusion lengths of the hybrid lead halide perovskite materials. In this review, some fundamental details of h...

A major drawback in using bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) as structural materials is their extremely poor fatigue performance. One way to alleviate this problem is through the composite route, in which second phases are introduced into the glass to arrest crack growth. In this paper, the fatigue crack growth behavior of in situ reinforced BMGs with crystalline dendrites, which are tailored to impa...

Chung, Haejun MSECE, Purdue University, December 2013. Time Domain Simulation With Novel Photovoltaic Materials. Major Professor: Peter Bermel. Thin-film silicon-based solar cells have operated far from the Shockley-Queisser limit in all experiments to date. Novel light-trapping structures, however, may help address this limitation. Finite-difference time domain simulation methods offer the pot...

A new class of organic photovoltaic materials, poly(rod-coil) polymers composed of alternatively definite conjugated and non-conjugated segments, have been proposed. The first five examples based on polyurethane chemistry showed photovoltaic performance surpassing the reference compound, but less dependent on their molecular weight.