(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-06-21)
Al Kurdi, Khaled Al
The demand for energy has increased dramatically with increase in population and industrialization. However, relying on traditional fossil fuels to meet those demands lead to climate change becoming an existential threat to the livelihood of humanity. Thus, to navigate the challenges of meeting the energy demand, researchers need to investigate pathways to pivot to more benign energy sources as well as discovering sustainable materials for a versatile range of energy applications. Conjugated organic materials have been of great interest for optoelectronic applications for the past 50 years to complement and/or substitute their inorganic counterparts.
This work aims to design and investigate the charge transport properties of conjugated organic materials. This is achieved by providing a diverse toolbox of structure- property studies to further understand the behavior of doped organic materials and guide future development. In addition, this thesis shows an example of how such polymers can used in solar cells to replace an inorganic oxide. Further, a family of dopants along with investigation into their kinetic behavior is presented to be used in the future developments of polymer: dopant systems.