Abstract

Harvesting solar energy can be a meaningful path towards a stable and renewable energy future. Outside of traditional silicon solar panels, an emerging technology of organic solar cells (OSC) shows promise. Along with rapidly improving efficiencies over 20%, OSCs offer unique benefits of flexibility, low cost, and semitransparency; however, the processing of OSC materials is problematic due to the use of costly and toxicity solvents. The purpose of this work is to develop green solvent processable polymers through two different approaches. First, through a combination of computational and experimental means, we aim to find new green solvents for current highperformance polymers, such as PTQ-10. Second, we aim to design novel solubilizing side chains for new conjugated polymers. This work applies Hansen Solubility Parameters (HSPs) to model the solubility of polymers in a variety of potential solvents. HSP are values derived from the intermolecular forces present in organic molecules and polymers. By determining the HSP values of a polymer, ideal solvents can be identified without rigorous guess-and-check methodology. From a synthetic standpoint, to avoid issues found in past oligo(ethylene glycol) side chain modification, we decided to work on adding side chains with a long alkyl segment capped with either an ionic or polar head. With HSP we can calculate the change in solubility with this new side chain and test green solvents with the new polymer. This work computationally finds three new solvents to dissolve PTQ10 and determines synthetic procedure to add new side chains to PTQ-10’s core.

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