We are pleased to announce that our Assistant Professor Prof. ZHANG Chen Jason’s research project, “Developing a database and computational platform to predict material properties of non-fullerene acceptors in organic solar cells,” has secured over HK$1.1 million under the Joint Research Scheme (JRS) jointly administered by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong.
Project Overview:
This project is dedicated to accelerating the development of non-fullerene acceptors (NFAs)—core materials for advancing organic solar cells (OSCs)—by building a reliable computational prediction framework, which addresses the inefficiency of current trial-and-error experimental approaches. Alkyl chains attached to NFA molecules are key to modulating solubility and electron mobility, two fundamental properties that directly determine OSC performance. However, optimising these alkyl chains is highly time-intensive, as demonstrated by the nearly six years of research needed to upgrade the Y6-family NFAs to the high-efficiency L8-BO-C4 variant. Drawing on prior work that developed high-precision machine learning models (with significantly lower prediction errors than conventional methods) for analysing molecular structures, this project integrates two core tasks: experimental measurements to clarify the relationship between alkyl chain structures and NFA key properties, and computational model expansion to develop a specialised module for alkyl chain analysis. The resulting integrated framework will predict optimal alkyl chain designs for NFAs, thereby streamlining material development and propelling OSC technology forward.
PolyU has secured funding for 13 research projects, totalling approximately HK$20.3 million, under the 2025/26 funding exercise of CRS and JRS. The NSFC/RGC CRS supports larger-scale, cross-disciplinary collaboration between Mainland and Hong Kong institutions to enhance research output and impact, while the JRS promotes collaboration between researchers and teams on both sides by leveraging complementary strengths.
