Dear World Community Grid users:

Welcome to the second phase of the Clean Energy Project! We want to thank you for contributing your idle computer time to this exciting project. Our team in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University is happy to be continuing the search for new solar cell materials using the computational time you have donated. With your help, we will be screening the properties of millions of molecules to look for the best possible candidates.

Solar cells you see most often on roofs today are made of rigid, structured semiconductors. These materials require a lot of energy to manufacture, making the overall cost of the photovoltaic cells higher. In contrast, we aim to mimic the amazing ability of plants to harvest sunlight using organic molecules. In the first phase of the project, we studied how these molecules stack together and interact with each other to form soft, bendable materials that could be included in lightweight and portable solar technologies. In this phase, we will be looking for new materials which would improve the efficiency of these carbon-based photovoltaics. Each work unit that your computer receives will be calculating the electronic properties of a new molecule, many of which have not yet been made in a lab. The chemical compounds with the best calculated properties will be sent to experimental groups to be synthesized and tested as solar cell materials!

We are very excited about the prospect of finding new solar cell materials using the time you donate to our project. In addition, we will be able to better understand the fundamental science behind solar cells by analyzing the enormous number of molecules we will have in our publicly accessible database. As the project advances, we will keep you posted on our findings in this forum. You can also visit our website for more information: http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu

Thank you again for donating your computer time for this project!

The Clean Energy Project team