Photon harvesting in organic solar cells is highly dependent on the anisotropic nature of the optoelectronic properties of photoactive materials. Here, we demonstrate an efficient approach to dramatically enhance photon harvesting in planar heterojunction solar cells by using a graphene-organic heterointerface. A large area, residue-free monolayer graphene is inserted at anode interface to serve as an atomically thin epitaxial template for growing highly orientated pentacene crystals with lying-down orientation. This anisotropic orientation enhances the overall optoelectronic properties, including light absorption, charge carrier lifetime, interfacial energetics, and especially the exciton diffusion length. Spectroscopic and crystallographic analysis reveal that the lying-down orientation persists until a thickness of 110 nm, which, along with increased exciton diffusion length up to nearly 100 nm, allows the device optimum thickness to be doubled to yield significantly enhanced light absorption within the photoactive layers. The resultant photovoltaic performance shows simultaneous increment in Voc, Jsc, and FF, and consequently a 5 times increment in the maximum power conversion efficiency than the equivalent devices without a graphene layer. The present findings indicate that controlling organic-graphene heterointerface could provide a design strategy of organic solar cell architecture for boosting photon harvesting.

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The scattering of rotor noise is an area that has received little attention over the years, yet the limited work that has been done has shown that both the directivity and intensity of the acoustic field may be significantly modified by the presence of scattering bodies. One of the inputs needed to compute the scattered acoustic field is the acoustic pressure gradient on a scattering surface. Two new analytical formulations of the acoustic pressure gradient have been developed and implemented in the PSU-WOPWOP rotor noise prediction code. These formulations are presented in this paper. The first formulation is derived by taking the gradient of Farassat's retarded-time Formulation 1A. Although this formulation is relatively simple, it requires numerical time differentiation of the acoustic integrals. In the second formulation, the time differentiation is taken inside the integrals analytically. The acoustic pressure gradient predicted by these new formulations is validated through comparison with the acoustic pressure gradient determined by a purely numerical approach for two model rotors. The agreement between analytic formulations and numerical method is excellent for both stationary and moving observers case.

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This paper reviews the equivalent source method (ESM), an attractive alternative to the standard boundary element method (BEM). The ESM has been developed under different names: method of fundamental solutions, wave superposition method, equivalent source method, etc. However, regardless of the method name, the basic concept is very similar; that is to use auxiliary points called equivalent sources to reconstruct the acoustic pressure for radiation or scattering problems. The strength of the equivalent sources are then determined via various approaches such that the boundary conditions on the boundary surface are satisfied. This paper reviews several frequencydomain and time-domain ESMs. There are several distinct advantages in these types of methods: (1) the method is a meshless approach so that it is easy and simple to implement; (2) it does not have a numerical singularity problem that occurs in the BEM; (3) the number of equivalent sources can be fewer than the number of surface collocation points so that the matrix size is reduced and a fast computation is achieved for large problems. The main issue of the ESM is that there is no rule to find out the optimal number and position of equivalent sources. In addition, the ESM suffers from the numerical instability that is associated with the ill-conditioned matrix. Some guidelines have been suggested in terms of finding the number and position of the sources, and several numerical techniques have been developed to resolve the numerical instability. This paper reviews the common theories, numerical issues and challenges of the ESM, and it summarizes recent developments and applications of the ESM to aircraft noise.