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Researchers ID Thousands of Organic Materials for Use in Solar Cells (Harvard Clean Energy Project)
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516281/researchers-id-thousands-of-organic-materials-for-use-in-solar-cells/[font face=Serif][font size=5]Researchers ID Thousands of Organic Materials for Use in Solar Cells[/font]
[font size=4]Using computers to virtually test new molecules could lead to new types of solar cells.[/font]
By Mike Orcutt on June 24, 2013
[font size=3]Using donated computing power and drawing on the theory of quantum mechanics, Harvard researchers have computationally screened 2.3 million organic molecules for properties relevant to photovoltaic applications and then organized them into a searchable, sortable database. The new library, which was released to the public today, will help guide the search for new organic photovoltaic materials.
The release of the database, announced by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, marks the second anniversary of the so-called Materials Genome Initiative, a federal effort to “double the pace of innovation, manufacture, and deployment of high-tech materials“—a process that normally can take years or decades. Agencies participating in the program, which aims to foster collaboration and data sharing among academic and private-sector materials science researchers, have awarded a total of $63 million to projects over the past year.
…
The large database released today represents the work of the so-called Harvard Clean Energy Project, headed by Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a chemistry professor at Harvard and one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35 in 2010. A goal of the project is to use high-throughput computing to help locate materials that can be used for more efficient organic electronics. In 2011, the group used computers to identify a material that, once synthesized and tested by collaborators at Stanford University, was shown have outstanding electronic properties (see “Speeding Up Materials Design”).
Identifying promising candidates for organic solar cells has been the focus of the project’s latest phase. The newly public screening library is organized according to properties attractive for solar cells, like the efficiency at which a material can convert the sun’s light into electricity. Organic materials generally do not do this very efficiently, but cells based on them could be lighter, more flexible, and potentially cheaper than those made from inorganic materials.
…[/font][/font]
[font size=4]Using computers to virtually test new molecules could lead to new types of solar cells.[/font]
By Mike Orcutt on June 24, 2013
[font size=3]Using donated computing power and drawing on the theory of quantum mechanics, Harvard researchers have computationally screened 2.3 million organic molecules for properties relevant to photovoltaic applications and then organized them into a searchable, sortable database. The new library, which was released to the public today, will help guide the search for new organic photovoltaic materials.
The release of the database, announced by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, marks the second anniversary of the so-called Materials Genome Initiative, a federal effort to “double the pace of innovation, manufacture, and deployment of high-tech materials“—a process that normally can take years or decades. Agencies participating in the program, which aims to foster collaboration and data sharing among academic and private-sector materials science researchers, have awarded a total of $63 million to projects over the past year.
…
The large database released today represents the work of the so-called Harvard Clean Energy Project, headed by Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a chemistry professor at Harvard and one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35 in 2010. A goal of the project is to use high-throughput computing to help locate materials that can be used for more efficient organic electronics. In 2011, the group used computers to identify a material that, once synthesized and tested by collaborators at Stanford University, was shown have outstanding electronic properties (see “Speeding Up Materials Design”).
Identifying promising candidates for organic solar cells has been the focus of the project’s latest phase. The newly public screening library is organized according to properties attractive for solar cells, like the efficiency at which a material can convert the sun’s light into electricity. Organic materials generally do not do this very efficiently, but cells based on them could be lighter, more flexible, and potentially cheaper than those made from inorganic materials.
…[/font][/font]
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