Kenttämaa Labs

Analytical & Physical Organic Chemistry

Nanomaterials

Metal chalcogenide materials have proven to be important in the field of semiconducting materials. Organic solution processing is beneficial way of fabricating flexible thin films from chalcogenide materials for flexible electronic devices since it uses less toxic chemicals and is cheaper than traditional methods. Amine-thiol mixtures provide an especially promising solvent system for dissolving metal chalcogenides. The goal of this project is to improve the understanding of the chemistry occurring in thiol-amine solutions containing various dissolved metal chalcogenides through tandem mass spectrometry measurements in order to ultimately develop better flexible solar cells. This project is in collaboration with Professor Agrawal’s group (Chemical Engineering, Purdue) that specializes in chalcogenide materials for flexible solar cells.

 

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Figure 3. (−)ESI mass spectra measured for Se and Te in butylamine (BA) – ethanethiol (ET) and ethylamine (EN) – ET solutions (* indicates ions without Se/Te atoms).

 

Reference:

  1. Deshmukh, S.D.; Easterling, L.F.; Manheim, J.M.; LiBretto, N.J.; Weideman, K.G.; Miller, J.T.; Kenttämaa, H.I.; Agrawal, R. Analyzing and Tuning the Chalcogen−Amine−Thiol Complexes for Tailoring of Chalcogenide Syntheses. Inorg. Chem. 2020, 59, 8240−8250.