Steve Kuei, 2012, Chemical and Biological Engineering

Steve Kuei ’12

My internship in Professor Lynn Loo’s laboratory focused on organic solar cells. In previous work, it has been shown that substrates with curved surfaces can induce preferential alignment in phase separated polymer domains. Continuing this idea, my work this summer used buckled structures made of Norland Optical Adhesive (NOA) as a substrate with both mean and gaussian curvature. I crystallized poly(3-(2′-ethyl)-hexylthiophene) (P3EHT), which has a fibrillar structure, onto these structures and analyzed them using atomic force microscopy.