The demand for petroleum dependent chemicals and materials has been increasing despite the dwindling of their fossil resources. As the dead-end of petroleum based industry has started to appear, today's modern society has to implement alternative energy and valuable chemical resources immediately. Owing to the importance of lignocellulosic biomass for being the most abundant and bio-renewable biomass on earth, this critical review provides insights into the potential of lignocellulosic biomass as an alternative platform to fossil resources. In this context, over 200 value-added compounds, which can be derived from lignocellulosic biomass by using various treatment methods, are presented with their references. Lignocellulosic biomass based polymers and their commercial importance are also reported mainly in the frame of these compounds. The review article aims to draw the map of lignocellulosic biomass derived chemicals and their synthetic polymers, and to reveal the scope of this map in today's modern chemical and polymer industry.

Stacking solar cells with decreasing band gaps to form tandems presents the possibility of overcoming the single-junction Shockley-Queisser limit in photovoltaics. The rapid development of solution-processed perovskites has brought perovskite single-junction efficiencies >20%. However, this process has yet to enable monolithic integration with industry-relevant textured crystalline silicon solar cells. We report tandems that combine solution-processed micrometer-thick perovskite top cells with fully textured silicon heterojunction bottom cells. To overcome the charge-collection challenges in micrometer-thick perovskites, we enhanced threefold the depletion width at the bases of silicon pyramids. Moreover, by anchoring a self-limiting passivant (1-butanethiol) on the perovskite surfaces, we enhanced the diffusion length and further suppressed phase segregation. These combined enhancements enabled an independently certified power conversion efficiency of 25.7% for perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells. These devices exhibited negligible performance loss after a 400-hour thermal stability test at 85°C and also after 400 hours under maximum power point tracking at 40°C.

We report on bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) organic photovoltaics (OPVs) based on the self-assembled monolayer (SAM) 2PACz as a hole-selective interlayer functionalized directly onto the indium tin oxide (ITO) anode. The 2PACz is found to change the work function of ITO while simultaneously affecting the morphology of the BHJ deposited atop. Cells with PM6:N3 BHJ and ITO-2PACz anode exhibit a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 16.6%, which is greater than that measured for bare ITO (6.45%) and ITO/PEDOT:PSS (15.94%) based devices. The enhanced performance is attributed to lower contact-resistance, reduced bimolecular recombination losses, and improved charge transport within the BHJ. Importantly, the ITO-2PACz-based OPVs show dramatically improved operational stability when compared with PEDOT:PSS-based cells. When the ITO-2PACz anode is combined with the ternary PM6:BTP-eC9:PC 71 BM BHJ, the resulting cells exhibit a maximum PCE of 18.03%, highlighting the potential of engineered SAMs for use in hole-selective contacts in high-performance OPVs.

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The performance of perovskite solar cells with inverted polarity ( p-i-n ) is still limited by recombination at their electron extraction interface, which also lowers the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of p-i-n perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells. A ~1 nm thick MgF x interlayer at the perovskite/C 60 interface through thermal evaporation favorably adjusts the surface energy of the perovskite layer, facilitating efficient electron extraction, and displaces C 60 from the perovskite surface to mitigate nonradiative recombination. These effects enable a champion V oc of 1.92 volts, an improved fill factor of 80.7%, and an independently certified stabilized PCE of 29.3% for a ~1 cm 2 monolithic perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell. The tandem retained ~95% of its initial performance following damp-heat testing (85 Celsius at 85% relative humidity) for > 1000 hours.