Organic based solution processable devices may revolutionise the lighting and photovoltaic industries of the future.
The move away from traditional inorganic materials is driven not only by cost considerations, but also sustainability issues and life-cycle costs. However, current organic device efficiencies and lifetimes are not high enough for many applications.
The addition of the carbon nanotubes typically comes at a cost. For example, in light emitting materials, the presence of the carbon nanotubes (CNT) reduces the emission from the composite, due to quenching of charge carriers at the nanotubes, which are generally metallic in nature for multi-walled CNT. This quenching reduces the emission efficiency of the devices.
Researchers at the Advanced Technology Institute of the University of Surrey, UK, in collaboration with researchers from China and the USA, have recently demonstrated a 100-fold increase in the light emission from a nylon polymer sample, by incorporating multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT).