time: 16:00 hrs

Location: Zaal E 

Birth of an era: PV as a global revolution

Several international institutions and expert panels project a substantial contribution to electric energy production by photovoltaic and concentrated solar power technology within the next thirty years. A view on the road towards yearly TWp installation will be given and the feasibility of getting there will be discussed. One of the potential candidates for mass production PV technology is that of ‘plastic’ PV. An introduction to the field of bulk heterojunction PV will be given. Subsequently, there will be focus on the very exciting recent developments. An important issue is tuning of the energy levels of the frontier orbitals of the donor-acceptor couple. A consistent theory concerning the optimal situation is still lacking. Lastly, we will address some developments that facilitate very large scale production of plastic PV products in due time.

Jan C. (Kees) Hummelen was born in Groningen, The Netherlands. He received his masters degree in Chemistry and a cum laude doctorate degree in Science under the mentorship of Hans Wynberg at the University of Groningen in 1979 and 1985, respectively. He continued working on the subject of his Ph.D. research until 1989. After four years of playing jazz (piano) and doing art video production in The Netherlands, he spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow with Fred Wudl at the Institute for Polymers and Organic Solids at UCSB in Santa Barbara, California. After spending six months with Bert (E.W.) Meijer at the Eindhoven Technical University, he returned to the University of Groningen where he was appointed Universitair Hoofddocent in 1998, and full Professor in Chemistry in 2000. The last twelve years, his main research activities have been in fullerene chemistry and the development of plastic photovoltaic technology. Other, more recent research topics in the field of molecular electronics are materials for molecular field effect transistors, biosensors, and the development of single-molecule electronics, based on internal pi-logic.