VO: University of Kentucky chemistry professor John Anthony is making low-cost solar cells
and transistors out of carbon, instead of silicon.
Carbon is a lot more versatile than silicone.
Silicone is basically a mineral, it’s a rock.
Which means you … are very limited in, how you can shape it.
In order to get the silicone they use in a solar cell, you have to take sand and heat
it with coal at thousands of degrees.
Carbon-based materials can be processed, they can be molded and shaped at much lower temperatures.
Right now, we’re working on what’s called a bulk hetero-junction organic photovoltaic.
That’s a lot of big words strung together…
to describe a process that is ridiculously simple.
You take a transparent conductor and you basically slather these organics on from a solution
like an ink and then the materials just spontaneously self-assemble into a working solar cell.
One of the grants we just got funding for, we’re trying to get a little more sophisticated
in using inkjet printing techniques to make organic solar cells.
You’d put a transparent conductor sheet of plastic which are easy to make into an
ink jet printer and use some of our proprietary inks and “zzzzz” and out the other end
pops a solar cell.
What can we do on a big scale?
The dream I have is there are a lot of printing plants that are used to printing high-resolution,
full-color images that are idle, so if we can just design inks to make solar cells that
way, think of the speed at which you could just start printing off solar cells.
Lightweight, flexible, you can put them on anything.
You know you can coat the windows of skyscrapers with solar cells and start generating some
the energy that’s used to cool down the skyscraper.
So there’s a lot of potential if we just get the scale up.
VO: Outrider Technologies, a company formed in 2005 based on Anthony’s research, is
making organic transistors for flexible, flat panel displays.
We’ve been able to put transistors, basically, integrated circuits on saran wrap, so plastic
that’s thinner than this…we can wrinkle it up and crumple it and it still works.
We actually just submitted this for publication to one of the nature journals.
So we know we can do the basic circuitry and that it’s stable, it doesn’t die when
you crumple it up and fold it up and stuff it in your pocket, right.
Then next question is can we get the performance out of it?
And that is where a good-sized effort of my research group is now turning its attention.
VO: With grants from the Navy, NSF and industrial sponsors, John Anthony’s research team recently
moved into the new laboratory building at the UK Center for Applied Energy Research.
Now that I’m out here, I’ve basically doubled the number of current, active research
grants.
Just because now I have the space to support people.
What we have to do as chemists is, we have to figure out what needs to be made, we have
to then figure out how to make it, and then we have to do the initial screening to see
if it’s going to have the right properties.
My graduate students in my group, right, they need to know an awful lot of physics, they
need to know a lot of electrical engineering, they need to know a lot of materials engineering,
in order just to figure out what molecule needs to be made and then all of their chemical
knowledge can come into play.
There are few things better in the world than having a different point of view.
I really like having ideas thrown at me from every single direction and using those ideas
to feed into new projects.
I can’t tell you how many new projects and how many grant dollars have been brought up
because I’ve gone to a seminar that’s completely out of my area.
And hearing somebody complain, saying, you know we could really advance this field if
only we could do this.
I know how to do that.
And a new collaboration is born.