Guillaume Wantz (Uni. of Bordeaux): "Towards Robust Organic Solar Cells Based On Responsible Materials Printed From Water"

Guillaume Wantz graduated from the School of Chemistry and Physics of Bordeaux (ENSCPB) in 2001 including a thesis work at Philips Research (Eindhoven, NL) on ink-jet printing. He received his Ph.D. in Electronics Engineering from the University of Bordeaux in 2004 working on Polymer Light Emitting Diodes. He was Assistant Professor at the University of Bordeaux working on Organic Field Effect Transistors with research stays at Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada). In 2006, he was appointed as tenure Associate Professor at the Bordeaux Institute of Technology (Bordeaux INP). He is Professeur des Universités since 2021. His research interest is on Organic Electronics with a focus on polymer photovoltaic solar cells (OPV). He was invited-professor at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada) in Spring 2012 and at Univ. of Massachusetts (Amherst, USA) in Fall 2014. He has been appointed at the “Institut Universitaire de France” (IUF Paris) in 2016. Since 2017, he is Associate Editor for the journal “Materials Chemistry Frontiers” (RSC). He is co-founder of Héole, a company developing flexible OPV products including solar-powered sails for yachting, a solar zeppelin and some BIPV flexible OPV products. To date, he has published 130 research papers in peer-reviewed international journals and issued 7 patents (h = 38 – 6400 citations – source Google Scholar).

Abstract: Printable organic photovoltaic solar cells (OPV), i.e. polymer solar cells, have now reached impressive power conversion efficiencies at lab scale over 19%. It is one crucial milestone towards the deployment of OPV products in real life. OPV holds many promisses including potential low cost, large scale, low temperature processing, low energy payback time, low carbon footprint  for the production of photovoltaic modules exempt of critical raw materials. However, today, not all are yet scientifically achieved. For example, commercially available OPV modules suffer from low PCE, from 3 to 5 % (30-50 Wp/m2) and are made with still costly raw materials mostly processed from toxic organic solvents. It is a matter of time for the industrial players to catch up with recent academic research to push industrial OPV performances further. This presentation will focuss on three of our recent results: (1) a doping strategy to enable a homojunction hole exctration layer for improved efficiency and stability of OPV, (2) the processing of OPV active layer from water based inks as the ultimate non-toxic, responsible printing with record efficiencies thanks to nanoparticules control and surface energy matching, (3) the investigation on the impact of synthesis impurities, such as metal catalyst residues, on the performances of OPV to design a strategy for cost-effective purification of raw materials. The presentation will end showing results obtained by Héole on OPV-powered sails for yachting for the last 2 years.