News

Mr. Harimohan Erabhoina joined AFUPO to work on new combinations of cathodes and solid polymer electrolytes, which will strengthen our battery research. Harimohan  has submitted his PhD thesis to NIT Warangal, India after working 4 years in the field of Li-S batteries and has developed many concepts to stabilize such a battery and to reduce the Li-polysulfide dissolution. He also developed high capacity anodes such as tin/graphene and silicon/graphite composites as an alternative anode to lithium metal.

In a conjugated gradient copolymer combining the hydrophilic ionic conductor PTHS and hydrophobic electronic conductor P3HT in different compositions, the water compatibility, swelling, Volume Capacitance and OECT-mobility could be varied and optimized to obtain high performance OECTS. See Chem. Mater. 2019

In an elegant approach of clicking multifunctionalities, Alexander demonstrates the utility and power of such an approach to create "custom-made" solid polymer electrolyte materials with single Li-ion conducting properties. The Poly(glycidyl propargyl ether) backbone itself offers Li-ion coordinating EO groups in addition to the OEG side chains clicked to it.

We present a comparative study of linear and brush polymers based on PEG towards application in L-batteries as solid polymer electrolytes. See ACS Applied Energy Materials, 2019 ASAP for details

One of the challenges in n-i-p perovskite solar cells is to create stable doped (n and p) extraction layers. In this paper (ACS Applied Energy Materials 2019, ASAP) we demonstrate the use of

Cu(TFSI)2 as dopant for spiro-OMeTAD without the need of additives such Li-TFSI or tBP and air-doping

Compartmentalized synthesis of P3HT-TiO2 nanocomposites with well-defined morphology via a micellar route was realized using the concept Self-organized Hybrids. See ACS Appl. Nano Mater. 2019, 2, 2133−2143

We successfully grafted a monolayer of P3HT in an end-on fashion using click chemistry and realized highly efficient SAMFETs using polymeric semiconductor for the first time. For details, see ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2018

With two publications, (PCCP, 2018 and JMC,C 2018) we studied in details the consequences of having traces of PbI2 in MAPI towards efficiency, stability and phase transition temperatures

In the field of polymer-based thermoelectrics, we strengthen our activities with a new Postdoc Dr. Goel

Nikita Gupta (Cens, Bangalore) and Dr. Mahima Goel (Ramjas College, New Delhi) joined our group as guest researchers in October 2017.