Powering West Midlands Growth: A Regional Approach to Clean Energy Innovation

The West Midlands is uniquely positioned to lead the UK in taking advantage of the economic opportunities arising from the global transition to a clean energy system. The region’s strengths include: strong and coherent political leadership committed to sustainability; the diversity of economic needs and scale of demand required to build competitive markets to support radical innovation; a world-class concentration of both academic and commercial expertise in the low-carbon energy sector; a massive programme of public and private investment in infrastructure planned for the next decade, and above all, the determination to secure long-term economic benefit from clean energy innovation. This report makes the case for the creation of a small number of Energy Innovation Zones (EIZs) across the region, acting as pathfinders for an approach that might subsequently be adopted across the country as a whole. EIZs enable barriers – such as powerful institutional silos separating transport, digital, planning and energy – to be overcome within designated geographies. They create a risk-managed and commercial-scale context for the development of new local clean energy markets. They also provide a practical mechanism to help attract investment and muster local political support. At a national level, they can help ensure innovation is built into the government’s strategic sector deals and other large scale public investment projects

Functional heterointerfaces via electromodulation spectroscopy

Functional heterojunctions in organic electronic devices are interfaces formed either between a conducting electrode and an organic semiconductor or between two different organic semiconductors in blended and multilayered structures. This thesis is primarily concerned with the energy level alignment and the interfacial electronic structures at functional heterojunctions encountered in electronic devices made with solution-processable semiconducting polymers. Investigations on the electronic structures across these heterointerfaces are performed with the combined use of electromodulation and photoemission spectroscopic techniques. Electromodulation and ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopic techniques enable direct determination of the surface work functions of electrodes at the electrode/semiconducting polymer interfaces. We overcame the inherent problems faced by electromodulation spectroscopy, which undermine accurate determination of interfacial electronic structures, by performing electroabsorption (EA) measurements at reduced temperatures. We showed in this thesis that low-temperature EA spectroscopy is a surface sensitive technique that can determine the interface electronic structures in electrode/polymer semiconductor/electrode diodes. Using this technique, we demonstrated that the energy level alignments in these solution-processed organic electronic devices are determined by the surface work functions of passivated metals rather than by those of clean metals encountered in ultrahigh vacuum. This thesis also discloses our studies on the electronic structures in polymeric diodes with type II donor-acceptor heterojunctions using the EA spectroscopy. We showed that minimising meausurement temperature and attenuating EA illumination intensity enable accurate determinations of the electronic structures in these devices. We demonstrated that the electronic structures and the performance characteristics of multilayered polymer light-emitting diodes are also determined by the surface work functions of passivated metals. Our investigations confirm that electronic doping of the organic active layers, rather than minimisation of the Schottky barriers at electrode/polymer contacts, holds the key in realising high-performance organic light-emitting devices.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo