Finding new solar cells made of plastic: one screensaver at a time

February 23, 2011,
4:00am - 5:30pm

In this talk, I will describe our group's effort for high-throughput analysis of candidate materials for organic photovoltaic materials by means of distributed computing using volunteer donors of CPU time. We work with IBM and the World Community Grid on "The Clean Energy Project" (http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu). The project is well underway, and we have calculated more than a million molecules to date. I will give an overview of organic photovoltaic materials, and describe the electronic structure calculations of the million molecules, as well as on our cheminformatics analysis of 3 million candidate molecular structures. A promising molecule was synthesized by Zhenan Bao at Stanford, and is currently being characterized. I will describe preliminary results of our collaborative work with her group