effzett: Interview with Christoph Brabec
Prof. Christoph Brabec is a director at the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy (IET-2), a branch office of Forschungszentrum Jülich. In the following interview excerpt, Professor Brabec discusses the importance of integrating recycling considerations into the design of photovoltaic materials and devices.
The full article is available can be read here.
Mr. Brabec, together with colleagues from Germany, the UK, and the USA, you have published a paper promoting the sustainable development of organic electronics. Could you tell us a bit more about this?
This technology is being used in more and more products. Displays are currently the largest market; you might be familiar with the terms AMOLED or OLED for TVs and smartphones. And more applications are set to be added in the coming years. To avoid producing unnecessary electronic waste in future, we need to design sustainable solutions for organic electronics today. In other words, we not only need to develop manufacturing processes and properties, but also plan for technical recycling solutions in the laboratory. In 20 years’ time, when a mass market may have developed, it will be too late.
What does organic electronics refer to exactly?
This is a collective term for electronic circuits consisting of organic polymers or smaller organic molecules. Above all, it refers to semiconductors, which are the central building blocks of all digital devices. The conventional variants are largely based on silicon, while the organic ones are mainly based on carbon. There are pure carbon semiconductors such as diamond, fullerene, or graphene. However, the typical variants are heterosystems, which contain elements such as sulphur, fluorine, or nitrogen.