Staff profile

Research

My research seeks to change the way that emerging photovoltaic (PV) technologies are developed by using techno-economic, energy system, and PV device models to show how they behave within energy systems.  This has two main aims, to enable scientists to infer real-world performance from lab-accessible measurements, and to use exploit the differentiated properties of new PV technologies compared to commerical Silicon.  

I am also interested in the charge transport physics of disordered materials.  This includes understanding how charge transport can influence the performance of Organic Photovoltaics (e.g. through use on Monte Carlo models) or Organic LEDs and LEFETs, as well as how disordered Carbon Nanotube Networks can be trained to perform Analogue computing functions like classification.

He has published more than 50 papers, book chapters, and review articles that have been cited more than 2500 times. He is Durham lead for two EPSRC funded Centres for Doctoral Training, ReNU and ReNU+ which collectively will train more than 100 PhD students to enable an equitable transition to Net Zero.

 

Prospective Research Students

I am always happy to talk to prospective students who are interested in undertaking a PhD or MRes in areas aligned to my current interests. It would be useful when you contact me if you could let me know what kind of research you are interested in (e.g. simulation, experiment, solar cells or otherwise) as this will help ascertain whether there is a suitable, interesting research proposal.  In cases where it is not possible to progress an application (e.g. lack of relevant expertise, or mismatch in research interests) I will try to direct you to another more suitable colleague or opportunity.

Please note that if you do not have your own funding ,you will need to secure some a Scholarship before you could start.  Like most academics in the UK, I do not have my own Scholarships to award, however, applicants can apply for a Scholarship through Durham Engineering's competitive process.   This usually happens around December each year for entry to a PhD in the following October.

Teaching

Currently I teach the Analogue Electronics content in the degree at levels 1 and 2 with the aim of equipping all of our undergraduate Engineers with a working knowledge of underpinning circuit theories and how sensor and actuator systems operate.  I also supervise Level 2 Design projects, and as well several Capstone projects at BEng, MEng and MSc level, usually around the application of Solar PV in Energy Systems.

• Emerging Photovoltaics and their application in energy networks
• Charge transport in Organic Semiconductors
• Unconventional Computing

• 2021: Chair of conference '3rd Gen PV for the developing world':
• 2018: Appointed Editor of Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics:
• 2017: Work highlighted in IEEE Spectrum:
• 2016: Invited review in Reports in Progress in Physics:
• 2014: Article chosen as Hot Article by PCCP:
• 2014: Article chosen to be on the cover of a special issue of PCCP:
• 2013: Article selected for Editor's choice: The advisory board of Energy & Environmental Science has selected our recent paper on charge separation in cascaded energy heterojunctions as Editor's choice.

Chapter in book

• Jones, B. A., Al Moubayed, N., Zeze, D. A., & Groves, C. (2022). In-Materio Extreme Learning Machines. In G. Rudolph, A. V. Kononova, H. Aguirre, P. Kerschke, G. Ochoa, & T. Tušar (Eds.), Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XVII (505-519). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14714-2_35
• Vissol-Gaudin, E., Kotsialos, A., Massey, M., Zeze, D., Pearson, C., Groves, C., & Petty, M. (2016). Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation. In M. Amos, & A. Condon (Eds.), . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41312-9
• Groves, C., & Greenham, N. (2014). Chapter 467 Monte Carlo Simulations of Organic Photovoltaics. In D. Beljonne, & J. Cornil (Eds.), Computational Photovoltaics. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/128_2013_467
• Groves, C. (2014). Modeling OPV Performance - Morphology, Transport and Recombination. In B. Rand, & H. Richter (Eds.), Organic Solar Cells - Fundamentals, Devices and Upsacling. Pan Stanford. https://doi.org/10.4032/9789814463669

Conference Paper

• Celis, A. A., Sun, H., Groves, C., & Harsh, P. (2024, October). Energy Self-Sufficiency Assessment of a Novel Low-Light Enhanced Photovoltaic Model in the Residential Sector. Presented at 2024 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition, ECCE 2024, Phoenix, AZ, USA
• Jones, B. A., Al Moubayed, N., Zeze, D. A., & Groves, C. (2023, November). Enhanced Methods for Evolution in-Materio Processors. Presented at IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing (ICRC 2021), Virtual
• Vissol-Gaudin, E., Kotsialos, A., Groves, C., Pearson, C., Zeze, D., Petty, M., & Al-moubayed, N. (2018, July). Confidence Measures for Carbon-Nanotube / Liquid Crystals Classifiers. Presented at 2018 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2018)., Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Vissol-Gaudin, E., Kotsialos, A., Massey, M., Zeze, D., Pearson, C., Groves, C., & Petty, M. (2016, July). Training a Carbon-Nanotube/Liquid Crystal Data Classifier Using Evolutionary Algorithms. Presented at 15th International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation, Manchester, UK

Journal Article

• Pope, T., Giret, Y., Fsadni, M., Docampo, P., Groves, C., & Penfold, T. J. (2023). Modelling the effect of dipole ordering on charge-carrier mobility in organic semiconductors. Organic Electronics, 115, Article 106760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgel.2023.106760
• Williams, C., Michaels, H., Crossland, A. F., Zhang, Z., Shirshova, N., MacKenzie, R. C. I., Sun, H., Kettle, J., Freitag, M., & Groves, C. (2023). Decarbonising electrical grids using photovoltaics with enhanced capacity factors. Energy & Environmental Science, 16(10), 4650-4659. https://doi.org/10.1039/d3ee00633f
• Jones, B. A., Chouard, J. L., Branco, B. C., Vissol-Gaudin, E. G., Pearson, C., Petty, M. C., Al Moubayed, N., Zeze, D. A., & Groves, C. (2022). Towards Intelligently Designed Evolvable Processors. Evolutionary Computation, 30(4), 479-501. https://doi.org/10.1162/evco_a_00309
• Littlefair, M. T. M., Simdyankin, S., Turvey, S., Groves, C., & Horsfall, A. B. (2022). Single event burnout sensitivity of SiC and Si. Semiconductor Science and Technology, 37(6), Article 065013. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6641/ac668c
• Nieto-Díaz, B. A., Crossland, A. F., & Groves, C. (2022). How does location determine the economic competitiveness of grid-scale Emerging PV?. Energy Technology, 10(5), Article 2101012. https://doi.org/10.1002/ente.202101012
• Palacios-Gómez, D. A., Huerta Flores, A. M., MacKenzie, R. C., Pearson, C., Alanazi, F., Mendis, B. G., & Groves, C. (2021). Differing Impacts of Blended Fullerene Acceptors on the Performance of Ternary Organic Solar Cells. ACS Applied Energy Materials, 4(10), 10867-10876. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsaem.1c01833
• Nieto-Díaz, B. A., Crossland, A. F., & Groves, C. (2021). A levelized cost of energy approach to select and optimise emerging PV technologies: The relative impact of degradation, cost and initial efficiency. Applied Energy, 299, Article 117302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.117302
• Vissol-Gaudin, E., Pearson, C., Groves, C., Zeze, D. A., Cantiello, H. F., Cantero, M. D. R., & Petty, M. C. (2021). Electrical behaviour and evolutionary computation in thin films of bovine brain microtubules. Scientific Reports, 11, Article 10776. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-90260-0
• Nieto-Díaz, B. A., Pearson, C., Al-Busaidi, Z., Bowen, L., Petty, M. C., & Groves, C. (2021). Enhanced lifetime of Organic Photovoltaic diodes achieved by blending with PMMA: Impact of morphology and Donor:Acceptor combination. Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, 219, Article 110765. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solmat.2020.110765
• Crossland, A., Scoles, K., Wang, A., Groves, C., & Sun, S. (2020). Assessment of Electricity Decarbonization Scenarios for New Zealand and Great Britain using a Plant Dispatch and Electrical Energy Storage Modelling Framework. Energies, 13(11), Article 2799. https://doi.org/10.3390/en13112799
• Nam, S., Chaudhry, M. U., Tetzner, K., Pearson, C., Groves, C., Petty, M. C., Anthopoulos, T. D., & Bradley, D. D. (2019). Efficient and Stable Solution-Processed Organic Light Emitting Transistors using a High-k Dielectric. ACS Photonics, 6(12), 3159-3165. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.9b01265
• Chaudhry, M. U., Tetzner, K., Lin, Y.-H., Nam, S., Pearson, C., Groves, C., Petty, M. C., Anthopoulos, T. D., & Bradley, D. D. (2018). Low-Voltage Solution-Processed Hybrid Light-Emitting Transistors. ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, 10(22), 18445-18449. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.8b06031
• Groves, C. (2017). Simulating charge transport in organic semiconductors and devices: a review. Reports on Progress in Physics, 80(2), Article 026502. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/80/2/026502
• AL-Busaidi, Z., Pearson, C., Groves, C., & Petty, M. (2016). Enhanced Lifetime of organic photovoltaic diodes utilizing a ternary blend including an insulating polymer. Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, 160, 101-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solmat.2016.10.018
• Massey, M., Kotsialos, A., Volpati, D., Vissol-Gaudin, E., Pearson, C., Bowen, L., Obara, B., Zeze, D., Groves, C., & Petty, M. (2016). Evolution of Electronic Circuits using Carbon Nanotube Composites. Scientific Reports, 6, Article 32197. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep32197
• Jones, M., Huang, D., Chakrabarti, B., & Groves, C. (2016). Relating Molecular Morphology to Charge Mobility in Semicrystalline Conjugated Polymers. Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 120(8), 4240-4250. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcc.5b11511
• Kaku, K., Williams, A., Mendis, B., & Groves, C. (2015). Examining Charge Transport Networks in Organic Bulk Heterojunction Photovoltaic Diodes using 1/f Noise Spectroscopy. Journal of Materials Chemistry C Materials for optical and electronic devices, 3(23), 6077-6085. https://doi.org/10.1039/c5tc00348b
• Jones, M., Dyer, R., Clarke, N., & Groves, C. (2014). Are hot charge transfer states the primary cause of efficient free-charge generation in polymer:fullerene organic photovoltaic devices? A kinetic Monte Carlo study. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 16(38), 20310-20320. https://doi.org/10.1039/c4cp01626b
• Williams, A., Farrar, P., Gallant, A., Atkinson, D., & Groves, C. (2014). Characterisation of Charge Conduction Networks in Poly(3-hexylthiophene)/Polystyrene Blends using Noise Spectroscopy. Journal of Materials Chemistry C Materials for optical and electronic devices, 2(9), 1742-1748. https://doi.org/10.1039/c3tc31849d
• Jones, L., Chakrabarti, B., & Groves, C. (2014). Monte Carlo Simulation of Geminate Pair Recombination Dynamics in Organic Photovoltaic Devices: Multi-Exponential, Field-Dependent Kinetics and Its Interpretation. Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 118(1), 85-91. https://doi.org/10.1021/jp408063f
• Groves, C. (2013). Developing understanding of organic photovoltaic devices: kinetic Monte Carlo models of geminate and non-geminate recombination, charge transport and charge extraction. Energy & Environmental Science, 6(11), 3202-3217. https://doi.org/10.1039/c3ee41621f
• Mendis, B. G., Bishop, S. J., Groves, C., Szablewski, M., Berlie, A., & Halliday, D. P. (2013). Plasmon-loss imaging of polymer-methanofullerene bulk heterojunction solar cells. Applied Physics Letters, 102(25), Article 253301. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4812485
• Groves, C. (2013). Organic light-emitting diodes: bright design. Nature Materials, 12, 597-598. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3688
• Groves, C. (2013). Suppression of geminate charge recombination in organic photovoltaic devices with a cascaded energy heterojunction. Energy & Environmental Science, 6(5), 1546-1551. https://doi.org/10.1039/c3ee24455e
• Luria, J., Hoepker, N., Bruce, R., Jacobs, A., Groves, C., & Marohn, J. (2012). Spectroscopic Imaging of Photopotentials and Photoinduced Potential Fluctuations in a Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cell Film. ACS Nano, 6(11), 9392-9401. https://doi.org/10.1021/nn300941f
• Lyons, B., Clarke, N., & Groves, C. (2012). The relative importance of domain size, domain purity and domain interfaces to the performance of bulk-heterojunction organic photovoltaics. Energy & Environmental Science, 5(6), 7657-7663. https://doi.org/10.1039/c2ee21327c
• Lyons, B., Clarke, N., & Groves, C. (2011). The Quantitative Effect of Surface Wetting Layers on the Performance of Organic Bulk Heterojunction Photovoltaic Devices. Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 115(45), https://doi.org/10.1021/jp2078709
• Yan, H., Swaraj, S., Wang, C., Hwang, I., Greenham, N., Groves, C., Ade, H., & McNeill, C. (2010). Influence of annealing and interfacial roughness on the performance of bilayer donor/acceptor polymer photovoltaic devices. Advanced Functional Materials, 20(24), 4329-4337. https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201001292
• Groves, C., Kimber, R., & Walker, A. (2010). Simulation of loss mechanisms in organic solar cells: A description of the mesoscopic Monte Carlo technique and an evaluation of the first reaction method. The Journal of Chemical Physics, 133(14), Article 144110. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3483603
• Giridharagopal, R., Shao, G., Groves, C., & Ginger, D. (2010). New SPM techniques for analyzing OPV materials. Materials Today, 13(9), 50-56. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1369-7021%2810%2970165-6
• Groves, C., Blakelsey, J., & Greenham, N. (2010). The effect of charge trapping on geminate recombination and polymer solar cell performance. Nano Letters, 10(3), 1063-1069. https://doi.org/10.1021/nl100080r
• Groves, C., Reid, O., & Ginger, D. (2010). Heterogeneity in Polymer Solar Cells: Local Morphology and Performance in Organic Photovoltaics Studied with Scanning Probe Microscopy. Accounts of Chemical Research, 43(5), 612-620. https://doi.org/10.1021/ar900231q
• Groves, C., Koster, L., & Greenham, N. (2009). The effect of morphology upon mobility: Implications for bulk heterojunction solar cells with nonuniform blend morphology. Journal of Applied Physics, 105(9), https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3117493
• Zaumseil, J., Groves, C., Winfield, J., Greenham, N., & Sirringhaus, H. (2008). Electron-Hole Recombination in Uniaxially Aligned Semiconducting Polymers. Advanced Functional Materials, 18(22), 3630-3637. https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.200800863
• Groves, C., & Greenham, N. (2008). Bimolecular recombination in polymer electronic devices. Physical review B, 78(15), Article 155205. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevb.78.155205
• Petrozza, A., Groves, C., & Snaith, H. (2008). Electron transport and recombination in dye-sensitized mesoporous TiO2 probed by photoinduced charge-conductivity modulation spectroscopy with Monte Carlo modeling. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 130(39), 12912-12920
• Groves, C., Marsh, R., & Greenham, N. (2008). Monte Carlo modeling of geminate recombination in polymer-polymer photovoltaic devices. The Journal of Chemical Physics, 129(11), Article 114903. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2977992
• McNeill, C., Westenhoff, S., Groves, C., Friend, R., & Greenham, N. (2007). Influence of nanoscale phase separation on the charge generation dynamics and photovoltaic performance of conjugated polymer blends: Balancing charge generation and separation. Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 111(51), 19153-19160
• Groves, C., & David, J. (2007). Effects of ionization velocity and dead space on avalanche photodiode bit error rate. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 55(11), 2152-2158
• Aivaliotis, P., Vukmirovic, N., Zibik, E., Cockburn, J., Indjin, D., Harrison, P., Groves, C., David, J., Hopkinson, M., & Wilson, L. (2007). Stark shift of the spectral response in quantum dots-in-a-well infrared photodetectors. Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 40(18), 5537-5540
• Marsh, R., Groves, C., & Greenham, N. (2007). A microscopic model for the behavior of nanostructured organic photovoltaic devices. Journal of Applied Physics, 101(8), Article 083509. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2718865
• Groves, C., Tan, C., David, J., Rees, G., & Hayat, M. (2005). Exponential time response in analogue and Geiger mode avalanche photodiodes. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 52(7), 1527-1534
• Groves, C., Chia, C., Tozer, R., David, J., & Rees, G. (2005). Avalanche noise characteristics of single AlxGa1-xAs(0.3 < x < 0.6)-GaAs heterojunction APDs. IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, 41(1), 70-75
• Groves, C., Harrison, C., David, J., & Rees, G. (2004). Temperature dependence of breakdown voltage in AlxGa1-xAs. Journal of Applied Physics, 96(9), 5017-5019
• Groves, C., David, J., Rees, G., & Ong, D. (2004). Modeling of avalanche multiplication and noise in heterojunction avalanche photodiodes. Journal of Applied Physics, 95(11), 6245-6251
• Groves, C., Ghin, R., David, J., & Rees, G. (2003). Temperature dependence of impact ionization in GaAs. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 50(10), 2027-2031
• Groves, C., David, J., & Rees, G. (2003). The effect of ionization threshold softness on the temperature dependence of the impact ionization coefficient. Semiconductor Science and Technology, 18(7), 689-692

Other (Print)

• Giridharagopal, R., Shao, G., Groves, C., & Ginger, D. (2010). New scanning probe microscopy techniques for analyzing organic photovoltaic materials and devices