and transistors out of carbon, instead of silicon.

Carbon is a lot more versatile than silicone. Silicone is basically a mineral, it’s a

rock. Which means you … are very limited in, how you can shape it. In order to get

the silicone they use in a solar cell, you have to take sand and heat it with coal at

thousands of degrees. Carbon-based materials can be processed, they can be molded and shaped

at much lower temperatures.

Right now, we’re working on what’s called a bulk hetero-junction organic photovoltaic.

That’s a lot of big words strung together… to describe a process that is ridiculously

simple. You take a transparent conductor and you basically slather these organics on from

a solution like an ink and then the materials just spontaneously self-assemble into a working

solar cell.

One of the grants we just got funding for, we’re trying to get a little more sophisticated

in using inkjet printing techniques to make organic solar cells. You’d put a transparent

conductor sheet of plastic which are easy to make into an ink jet printer and use some

of our proprietary inks and “zzzzz” and out the other end pops a solar cell.

What can we do on a big scale? The dream I have is there are a lot of printing plants

that are used to printing high-resolution, full-color images that are idle, so if we

can just design inks to make solar cells that way, think of the speed at which you could

just start printing off solar cells. Lightweight, flexible, you can put them on anything. You

know you can coat the windows of skyscrapers with solar cells and start generating some

the energy that’s used to cool down the skyscraper. So there’s a lot of potential

if we just get the scale up.

VO: Outrider Technologies, a company formed in 2005 based on Anthony’s research, is

making organic transistors for flexible, flat panel displays.

We’ve been able to put transistors, basically, integrated circuits on saran wrap, so plastic

that’s thinner than this…we can wrinkle it up and crumple it and it still works. We

actually just submitted this for publication to one of the nature journals. So we know

we can do the basic circuitry and that it’s stable, it doesn’t die when you crumple

it up and fold it up and stuff it in your pocket, right. Then next question is can we

get the performance out of it? And that is where a good-sized effort of my research group

is now turning its attention.

VO: With grants from the Navy, NSF and industrial sponsors, John Anthony’s research team recently

moved into the new laboratory building at the UK Center for Applied Energy Research.

Now that I’m out here, I’ve basically doubled the number of current, active research

grants. Just because now I have the space to support people.

What we have to do as chemists is, we have to figure out what needs to be made, we have

to then figure out how to make it, and then we have to do the initial screening to see

if it’s going to have the right properties.

My graduate students in my group, right, they need to know an awful lot of physics, they

need to know a lot of electrical engineering, they need to know a lot of materials engineering,

in order just to figure out what molecule needs to be made and then all of their chemical

knowledge can come into play.

There are few things better in the world than having a different point of view. I really

like having ideas thrown at me from every single direction and using those ideas to

feed into new projects.

I can’t tell you how many new projects and how many grant dollars have been brought up

because I’ve gone to a seminar that’s completely out of my area. And hearing somebody

complain, saying, you know we could really advance this field if only we could do this.

I know how to do that. And a new collaboration is born.