Hi, my name Is Ingmar Bruder. I’m a research scientist in BASF.
So BASF is the largest chemical company in the world
and our business segments are plastics and performance chemicals as for example
coatings or functional polymers, functional solutions, as for example construction
chemicals and certainly agricultural, and oil and gas.
So in the year 2050 is expected that about
nine billion people will live on this planet and
most of them want to be mobile and the question is how to find a way
to ensure mobility in a sustainable and a cost efficient way
and one possibility could be to invent cars which
drive by electric engines. So what we're doing in BASF is we are developing
organic photovoltaics, organic solar cells, and since this is a very complex topic
a lot of people from different professions have to work together
for example chemists, quantum chemists and physicists.
So since we are a chemical company and we will sell
materials, chemicals, in the end of the day which can be used to produce organic solar cells
we need additionally partners from industry or from academia,
to make systems, to make complete organic photovoltaic systems.
Traditional solar cells are made mainly out of silicon and the reason for that is that it
can be processed very well, it conducts very well,
and it absorbs light in the right optical range.
Here in these labs,
my team and myself we are developing organic photovoltaic devices
and basically one of these devices you can see here and
this type of solar cell was also used in the Smart forvision
So the main difference between
solar cells based on inorganic materials for example silicon
and organic solar cells is that here dyes are used to convert light into electricity
And BASF has knowledge
or a lot of know-how of about over 140 years
in inventing in creating new dyes and what we did here is
to invent a new dye class which can convert light into electricity
and the big advantages of these solar cells
are that they can be produced very cheap, in a very cheap and easy way.
You can produce them in any color basically you want to have and they are transparent.
So basically what you're seeing here
are different organic solar cells. You see if they're made out of different colors
different dyes and they are running a helicopter as a demonstrator
but certainly this is a demonstrator and for future applications you want to
power real devices and
how that might look like you can see here. So basically that's a mobile phone charger
powered by organic transparent solar cells
basically here you see my blackberry and I can put it here on the charger
and you can see here the clock appears which means that
my blackberry is charged at the moment. So if you want to design the perfect solar cell
it should be black because certainly a black color is absorbing all the visible light
However with organic solar cells we can produce any color you want to have for aesthetic reasons
So if you're buying nowadays solar cells for your house
you have a guarantee that the solar cells will live for about twenty years.
They're pretty efficient and you pay something between one euros and two euros per watt peak
So what we're doing actually here in our lab is to increase efficiency of the
organic solar cells to increase the lifetime in order to catch up with existing technologies
and even more important that we are developing here the production mechanism
allowing us to produce our solar cells in the end of the day for much cheaper conditions
So if we are talking about market entrance of organic photovoltaics we
have to distinguish between different markets. For example if you're talking
about consumer electronics
there will be first products available probably in the next few years.
If we're talking about construction then the
properties or the issues of the solar cells are much tougher to handle,
for example we have to provide a lifetime of twenty years,
we have to provide efficiencies of two digit values and this will take some more years.
So as a scientist you're not reproducing things what other people
have done before or you're not waiting for orders.
As a scientist you have to be creative, you have to be foolish and that's how I am
and therefore I like my job.