I Have a Research Support System

Among the three schemes based on the improvement of transmission layer materials, the first and second are relatively simple, just use the existing materials to test directly, while the third scheme is a little more complicated, Xu Qiu just has a general idea , but how to do it, he still doesn't know.

Before using the simulation laboratory, it is necessary to find the preparation process corresponding to the third scheme, because if the simulation laboratory is allowed to explore by itself, the time cost will be high.

Fortunately, the preparation process of common and widely used inorganic metal oxide materials such as zinc oxide is very mature, and the "wheels" made by the predecessors can be used directly.

At this time, it involves the problem of finding information.

For an application-oriented field such as organic photovoltaics, the main way to find information is to read papers and documents published by others, rather than searching related professional books.

Because of the partial application field, the iteration speed of the processing technology is very fast. It may be the best technology a year ago, but it is outdated now.

It takes time to compile and print books, and it is not possible to modify them in real time. There is a big lag, and it is naturally not very convenient to use.

The literature is different. If you want to know the latest progress in a field, you only need to read the recent review articles to get a general understanding. If you are interested in the work, you can also find specific articles through the cited references. , You can even directly find the corresponding author of the paper, and send emails to communicate.

Of course, books in the scientific research circle are not useless, especially in basic sciences such as mathematics and physics, books are still very important.

When Han Jiaying was just getting started, she was reading "Semiconductor Physics" in her arms, and had a preliminary understanding of the basic concepts in the field of semiconductors, including "built-in electric field" and "pn junction".

These underlying concepts and logic are relatively fixed and will not become outdated.

Even if it is later proved to be "wrong", such as Newton's three laws, it can also be said to be "limitations of the times", and it is enough to add two patches of "relativity" and "quantum mechanics" to the original theory.

Xu Qiu summed up three methods of looking up literature, all of which were taught to him by Senior Sister Chen Wanqing.

Although the senior sister often has problems in experiments and English is also a major shortcoming, her scientific research skills in other aspects are not bad.

The first method, the most commonly used method in Wei Xingsi's research group, is to collect all the recent literature in a field and read them all one by one. There is a high probability that it can solve the problems encountered in the experiment.

However, the premise of this method is that there must be a complete literature database, which is what Wei Xingsi has been doing in the group.

In fact, in most research groups, it is the students themselves who do this work, and they need to consult the literature by themselves. Wei Xingsi's group is a special case.

When he was an undergraduate, Xu Qiu also took a course called "Literature Retrieval", which was set up by the school because the school worried that students who wanted to keep their research would not be able to consult literature after they entered the postgraduate stage.

From this point of view, while Mr. Wei entrusts many things to his students, he also undertakes many things that should be done by the students themselves.

The second is that when the existing literature database cannot solve the current problem, or when you are more interested in a certain direction or a certain researcher, you need to take the initiative to find literature by yourself.

Generally, use the web of science (wos), Google Dog Academic Mirror and other literature search engine websites to directly search for keywords and perform fuzzy searches.

For example, if you want to know the field of "organic solar cells", you can enter "organic solar cells" to search, and if you want to know which articles the author "Xu Qiu" has published, you can enter "Xu Qiu" to search.

The document search engine will list all eligible documents according to the relevance of the documents, usually tens of thousands of search results, even if you search for "Qiu Xu", there will be many articles by other people with the same name as Xu Qiu. Search it out.

Therefore, this method of searching for documents is a needle-in-a-haystack style, and it may not be effective at all times, and may not be able to obtain the desired results.

The main reason is that millions of academic papers are published every year, and the scientific research circle has developed for hundreds of years. If the total number of articles does not exceed 100 million, at least there are tens of millions of articles. It is necessary to search from so many articles. One can imagine how difficult it is to find the literature you want.

In addition, although various literature search engines have advanced search functions, and you can set search conditions by yourself, the algorithms of current academic search engines are not smart enough.

If the conditions are added less, it is useless. If the conditions are added, nothing will be found in the end.

Therefore, Xu Qiu used this fuzzy search method relatively less.

When he uses wos, he usually directly enters the title of his article, conducts a precise search, and sees the real-time citations of his article, whether there is a small crown or a small flame.

The third way is to use the molecular structure for literature search.

When the molecular structure of a material is known and you are more interested in the specific synthetic route involving this material, you can use a tool called SciFinder to search.

SciFinder is the academic version of the online version of the "Chemical Abstracts" database published by the Chemical Abstracts Service CAS under the American Chemical Society (ACS). There are software versions and web versions.

Similar to academic journals, this tool also requires a fee. Xu Qiu does not know the specific fee, but it is definitely not low when it is related to scientific research.

Fortunately, Modu Comprehensive University has purchased the permission, as long as it is covered by the campus network, it can be used directly.

Generally, when Xu Qiu plans to synthesize a new material, if he can't draw inspiration from the existing literature library, he will try his luck here.

The specific operation is a bit similar to CHEMDRAW software. When you log in to SciFinder, the web page will have its own molecular structure drawing tool. You can directly draw the structural formula for retrieval, and you can get the chemical reaction equation related to the drawn molecular structure.

This method is more suitable for materials with complex molecular structures, such as the ITIC developed by Xu Qiu. If the full English name is written out, it is estimated that there are 100 English letters.

Xu Qiu also tried to obtain the English name of ITIC by using the "convert molecular structure to standard naming" function provided by CHEMDRAW software, but the software directly prompted: "The structure is too complicated to convert".

Of course, his ITIC materials have English abbreviations, and they can also be retrieved directly through literature search engines.

For some materials or reaction intermediates without abbreviations, which cannot be searched by literature search engines, SciFinder is a very useful tool.

It is worth mentioning that, perhaps because the tool SciFinder is too popular, the webpage often comes to the aunt, and it will prompt: "there are too many requests at the moment, please try again later".

I worked hard to draw the molecular structure for a few minutes or more than ten minutes, but a prompt came out and I refreshed the webpage. All the molecular structures drawn before were all in vain, which was quite frustrating.

The task now is to find literature on "Preparation Process of Low-Temperature Zinc Oxide Thin Film".

Xu Qiu first ruled out the third method. The molecular structure of zinc oxide is very simple, and there is no need to search through SciFinder. For the first and second methods, he chose the first one.

For the current task, the second method is not impossible. For example, if you directly search for "preparation of zinc oxide nano-film", you will definitely be able to find some literatures that specialize in zinc oxide, but most of these literatures are not in the field of organic photovoltaics. dedicated.

Taking the wheel as an example, Xu Qiu now needs a small wheel with a diameter of 1. Although the documents retrieved by the second method are also wheels, they may be large wheels with a diameter of 2, which cannot directly meet Xu Qiu’s needs. It is also necessary to take these wheels and process them again before they can be applied.

However, if you use the first method to retrieve peer literature, this problem will not arise, because they are all similar systems, and they must use a wheel with a diameter of 1, just take it directly.

...

An afternoon passed.

Xu Qiu found an article by the Chinese researcher Yang Yang's research group, which involved the low-temperature preparation process of zinc oxide thin films.

Yang Yang is one of the top leaders in the field of organic photovoltaics, and the reference value of the articles of their research group is still relatively high.

This is a "low temperature" method that only requires annealing at 80 degrees Celsius: first complete the preparation of the precursor solution, the solvent used is methanol, then overnight stirring is required for the reaction, and finally spin coating and thermal annealing at 80 degrees Celsius.

The zinc oxide transport layer film used in organic photovoltaic devices is actually composed of zinc oxide nanoparticles with a relatively uniform particle size. It appears to be a two-dimensional nano-film, but it is essentially zero-dimensional. nanoparticles.

The sol-gel method is to first use the zinc oxide precursor solution to obtain a sol, then convert it into a gel, and finally convert the gel into zinc oxide nanoparticles at high temperature, and high temperature is required in the last conversion process.

Seeing the step of "overnight stirring reaction", combined with the condition of "low temperature" annealing, Xu Qiu speculated that the method used by Yang Yang and the others was not the sol-gel method commonly used in the group.

It may be that the solution of zinc oxide nanoparticles is directly prepared, so that the nanoparticle is directly obtained during spin coating, so in the end, high temperature annealing is not required to convert the gel into a zinc oxide nanofilm, only a relatively "low temperature" is required The solvent needs to be volatilized, and the boiling point of methanol is only 64.7 degrees Celsius, so a thermal annealing temperature of 80 degrees Celsius is sufficient.

In the simulation laboratory, Xu Qiu used non-stacked common standard sample systems, including PCE10:PCBM, J2:ITIC, etc. to conduct experiments to explore the impact of three methods of optimizing the transport layer on device performance.