Research Themes and Topics

Energy Materials and devices

Solar Photovoltaics: Organic, Perovskite and Tandem Materials and Solar Cells

In this area, our emphasis is to fabricate solar PV devices based on third generation materials to develop high efficiency and high life time devices. These devices are being made to improve their performance, low temperature processing and to reduce the use of toxic elements such as Lead.

Multiferroics, Ferroelectrics and Piezoelectrics

Here, we are studying the devices and materials based on oxides, such as ferroelectric and/or multiferroic oxides, piezoelectric materials as well as polymers such as P(VDF-TrFE) from the perspective of energy harvesting, piezoelectric activity, data storage applications, to name a few, Our work is related to engineering the material's structure and properties to achieve the desired functionality in stand-alone as well as device form and requires one to delve into understanding of materials, physics and some electrical engineering, particularly for device work.

Energy Harvesting Materials and Devices

In this area, we work on developing energy harvesting materials and devices to exploit piezoelectric and triboelectric energy available in the ambient to developed self powered devices important for several wearable electronics applications.

Development of Specialty Metals and Alloys

The emphasis of this work is to develop metals and alloys and their coatings for various engineering applications such as railways, structural applications as well as to investigate the underlying correlations between the crystal structure, micro-structure and properties.

Lab Facilities

We have variety of equipments for fabrication and characterization of materials, thin films and devices. A partial list includes

  • Pulsed laser deposition and sputtering system
  • Chemical solution deposition system
  • Glove box enabled solution deposition and evaporation system for metals and organics
  • Impedance analyzer
  • I-V measurements for a variety of materials and solar cells
  • Quantum efficiency measurements for PV devices
  • Solar Simulator
  • Temperature dependent probe station
  • Ferroelectric, piezoelectric and magnetoelectric testing setups
  • Asylum scanning force microscope MFP-3D
  • Various other minor equipments such as electrometer, source meters etc
  • SQUID-VSM (Cryogenic)
  • Profilometer
  • Departmental/Institute facilities: High resolution XRD, Raman, FTIR, FESEM, DSC/TGA, XPS, Mechanical testing, polishing, sample preparation etc

Bulk of our solution processing is carried out in clean room of class 10,000 while devices are made in a class 100 clean room atmosphere or glove box.