Proceedings Article | 2 November 2016
KEYWORDS: Organic photovoltaics, Solar cells, Metals, Electrodes, Polymers, Molecules, Resistance, Heterojunctions, Annealing, Sun
The power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of bulk heterojunction organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices have been reported more than 10%. Recently, in our group, we have achieved a PCE of greater than 11% with an inverted device geometry (device area 0.1 cm2) using a ternary blend comprising, an organic donor polymer, small molecule, and PC71BM, as an active layer. However, the device performance of OSC suffers significant drop with the device area scaling up due to sheet resistance of transparent electrode. In this work, we have used a thin layer of metal grid on top of transparent electrode to reduce the sheet resistance. Using this strategy, we fabricated inverted organic photovoltaic devices with an active layer composed of a ternary blend of poly[4,8-bis(5-(2-ethylhexyl)thiophen-2-yl)benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b′]dithiophene-co-3-fluorothieno[3,4-b] thiophene-2-carboxylate] (PTB7-Th) and small molecule (BTR)1 as the donors and PC71BM as the acceptor and we have achieved the PCE of greater than 8% for square centimetre active area devices. We also studied the role of metal grid thickness as well as geometry and annealing of active layer on the performance of OSCs.
1. K. Sun, Z. Xiao, S. Lu, W. Zajaczkowski, W. Pisula, E. Hanssen, J. M. White, R. M. Williamson, J. Subbiah, J. Ouyang, A. B. Holmes, W. W. H. Wong, D. J. Jones, Nat. Commun. 2015. (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7013).