Organic solar cells (OSC) are a next generation solar energy technology that offers the advantages of scalable fabrication, light weight, flexibility, and earth-abundant starting materials. Despite tremendous advances in OSC power conversion efficiency (PCE) over the last decade, active layer material selection and optimization is still largely empirical. In order...
Self-assembly of colloidal particles at the nano- and microscale has been a powerful tool for producing structures with emergent properties in applications ranging from electro-mechanical systems to photonics and biomedical devices. Great success has been achieved in experiments, where a variety of exotic phases have been discovered and even reconfigurable...
The field of materials discovery is undergoing an unprecedented transition from laboratory tocomputer. Behind this transition is the new ability to accurately compute material properties, especially
energetic stability, from first principles with density functional theory (DFT). However,
DFT remains computationally expensive, and DFT-based materials discovery is intractable, especially
in high...
Rapid changes in global climate are pushing nations to reduce CO2 emissions and adopt clean energy technologies for renewable energy generation and storage. As wind and solar are implemented worldwide, a commensurate response in energy storage will need to be installed to meet fluctuations in peak energy demands and generation...
Water vapor condenses into liquid water when it encounters a cold surface. If the surface temperature is sufficiently low, freezing follows the condensation step, and the process is holistically referred to as condensation frosting. Both phase change processes are fundamental to many industries ranging from water harvesting, thermal management, solar...
Recent advances in high-performance computing have resulted in massive databases of materials properties calculated with techniques such as ab initio density functional theory. In fact, some of the largest of such databases have calculations of nearly all distinct, ordered, experimentally-reported compounds. This thesis discusses the application of data in one...
Polymers occupied nearly every facet of our daily lives, and enhancing their mechanical and fracture properties has long been an important topic in the field of polymer science. Based on the various need in applications, polymers are designed to have a range of characteristics such as tackiness, optical properties, mechanical...