Following the talk of Dr. Barbara Primera Darwich on perovskites, we had the chance to host Dr. Liang Yao (LY) within the ASSET Lab’s Research Seminar Series (RSS) (23/11/2022), where he shared the exciting progress on organic semiconductors for solar chemistry.
Solar water splitting by means of photoelectrochemical devices has been highly regarded for decades as a potential route to source hydrogen in a sustainable manner. However, despite the efforts of many of us working in the field and trying to improve the lifetime of the devices, the solar-to-hydrogen conversion or the cost of the solar hydrogen, among other features, these values are not good enough to be deemed suitable for commercialization. In this talk, LY presented a different route to address these issues. What if all the limitations came from the type of semiconductors we use? LY proposes to replace the inorganic semiconductors that we are used to investigate by organic semiconductors. And, there are certainly, many advantages. For instance, (i) we could mass-produced the semiconductors and solution-processed them cutting-down the costs of electrode manufacturing, (ii) they are highly tunable so we could adjust the optical properties and (iii) they have shown excellent light-harvesting properties and photovoltaic responses. In this talk, LY took us in a journey where he disclosed the most promising architectures of such devices (organic and hybrid bulk heterojunctions) as well as the main issues he encountered when developing such systems. Briefly, Dr. LY, demonstrated that one of the main issues of such systems is the corrosion of the organic semiconductors under operation, which could be mitigated by accelerating the charge-transfer kinetics as he demonstrated. As a proof of concept for such technology, he recently reported a standalone photoelectrochemical device for simultaneous H2 and I2 production operating in HI. Finally, Dr. LY described some of his latest work, focusing on the design and development of new covalent organic frameworks (COF) for solar chemistry. Overall, the prospects of implementing organic semiconductors as photoelectrodes for redox chemistry and the future of solar water splitting technologies were discussed.
Solar water splitting by means of photoelectrochemical devices, [...] are not good enough to be deemed suitable for commercialization. [...] LY proposes to replace the inorganic semiconductors that we are used to investigate by organic semiconductors.
Bio: LY is currently a Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Germany) within the group of Prof. Lostch, where he joined in 2019 first as a postdoctoral researcher. Before that, LY gained experience in the field or organic photoelectrodes and pioneered a new generation of hybrid organic solar cells a postdoctoral researcher within the group of Prof. Sivula at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2015). Prior to that, LY completed his PhD at Jilin University (with Prof. Ma) in the field of OLEDs, which undoubtedly endowed him with a unique background in organic semiconductors that he later leveraged to advance new fields in photovoltaics and photoelectrochemistry. Among several distinction, LY was recipient of the prestigious Humboldt fellowship (2020) and the Outstanding Doctoral thesis of Jilin University (2015).
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