Publication date: 23rd October 2020
Organic solar cells are recognized as promising energy sources for powering various indoor devices and sensors.[1,2] Development of efficient large-area photovoltaic modules (PMs) requires the materials with advanced physicochemical and photovoltaic properties, which allow for device upscaling and can be potentially processed through industrial roll-to-roll printing and coating techniques in the future.[3] Recently, we demonstrated that thiazolothiazole-based (X-DADAD)n-type polymers are promising materials for large-area photovoltaic modules.[4]
In this work, we fabricated organic PMs based on the conjugated polymer Tz-T4BTB (Fig.1a in SI) with an active area of ca. 16 cm2. The devices with inverted configuration of ITO/ZnO/polymer-fullerene blend/MoO3/Ag were processed using slot-die coating method. In order to evaluate the possibility of using the designed PV modules for powering up the wireless devices with low energy consumption, we measured the characteristics of the PMs under different illumination conditions (LED lamp, 4000K, Figure 1b in SI)
It can be seen that the output power of the PV module increases with increasing the light intensity. At the light intensity of 250 lux the PM provides 35 µW of power that is sufficient for powering the radio channel smoke detector with the power consumption of 30 µW. Smoke detector was assembled by using ultra low power harvester BQ25570 (Texas Instruments) with MPPT function. A supercapacitor with the capacity of 0.33F was used as an energy storage device.
We also investigated the characteristics of the assembled device at different illumination levels and revealed that it can operate in a fully autonomous regime under indoor conditions with the illumination level of 300 lux.
Thus, the obtained results feature the potential of OSCs based on (X-DADAD)n-type polymers to be used as tunable energy supplies for powering small wireless sensors under indoor illumination conditions.
This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant No. 18-33-20025). General support was also provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation within the project No. AAA-A19-119071190044-3 (0089-2019-0010).
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