Electrical engineering and computer science doctoral candidate Sanjib Das recently got a heavy dose of good news involving some of his research.
Das, whose work involves improving solar cell efficiencies, saw his research published in two high-impact journals and won a poster competition for his effort in explaining his ideas.
That gold award for the poster “High-Performance Flexible Perovskite Solar Cells by Using a Combination of Ultrasonic Spray-Coating and Photonic Curing” came at the recent Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) gathering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“We used a process called ultrasonic spray-coating to deposit uniform, dense and high-quality perovskite thin films and fabricated high-efficiency solar cells using those films,” said Das.
Perovskites are materials with excellent optoelectronic properties that lend them well to solar cells.
“We also fabricated high-performance and mechanically robust solar cells at ORNL on flexible substrates by using a combination of the ultrasonic spray-coating process and a unique annealing technique called photonic curing.”
That work was published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Photonics.
While those successes alone are impressive, the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale also took interest in Das’s work.
For that publication, Das explained a different process of working with solar cells.
“Advances in material design and device engineering led to inverted organic solar cells with superior power conversion efficiencies compared to their conventional counterparts,” said Das. “That’s in addition to their well-known better ambient stability.”
Das, who is on course to graduate this semester, studies under Associate Professor Gong Gu, as well as CNMS staff scientist Kai Xiao. He said the various honors meant a lot to him, personally, but that he was also happy for “getting the opportunity to talk about exciting research findings in our group.”