Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV14)
Publication date: 1st March 2014
Organic solar cells using blends of semiconducting polymer and fullerene derivatives convert sun-light to electricity in a limited spectral range, because common organic semiconductors exhibit relatively narrow absorption bands. On the one hand, this is a main factor limiting the efficiency of organic solar cells, but on the other hand, a restricted absorption range opens also new perspectives for specific applications. Combined with two partly transparent electrodes, polymer:fullerene absorber layers can be used to create semitransparent organic solar cells with a high transmittance in part of the visible range of the solar spectrum, potential applications being for example photovoltaic windows. In the present work, semitransparent solar cells have been realized with poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) as widely used organic semiconductors. A common electrode material with high transparency is indium tin oxide (ITO), but it has the disadvantage that the transition metal indium is a relatively scarce and expensive resource. Therefore, alternative electrodes were employed in the work to be presented. The cathode was made of sputter-deposited aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO), coated with a layer of wet-chemically prepared zinc oxide nanocrystals. Similar as previously shown for other organic solar cells [1], the interlayer of colloidally prepared ZnO nanocrystals had a beneficial impact on the device performance. On the anode side, ultrathin metal films of Au or Ag were used, with an interlayer made of molybdenum oxide (MoO3) or tungsten oxide (WO3) introduced between the metal electrode and the absorber layer. Optionally, the transition metal oxide can be deposited additionally on top of the metal electrode to form an outer “capping layer”. The device performance was found to depend strongly on the thickness of the transition metal oxide layers on the anode side. Up to about 2% power conversion efficiency were obtained for the ITO-free, semitransparent solar cells prepared within this work. Figure 1 shows exemplarily typical current-voltage curves as well as a photograph of the corresponding devices. In order to get deeper insight into the device physics, measurements of the external quantum efficiency were carried out, and optical simulations were performed to study the distribution of the electric field intensity in the devices as a function of the thickness of the different material layers. A systematic analysis of the system will be presented.
Figure 1 – Current density-voltage curves and a photograph of ITO-free, semitransparent P3HT:PCBM solar cells
[1] S. Wilken, D. Scheunemann, V. Wilkens, J. Parisi, and H. Borchert; Improvement of ITO-free inverted polymer-based solar cells by using colloidal zinc oxide nanocrystals as electron-selective buffer layer, Org. Electron. 13, 2386-2394 (2012).
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