In order to induce greater light absorption, nano-patterning is often applied to the metal-oxide buffer layer in inverted bulk-heterojunction(BHJ) solar cells. However, current homogeneity was significantly disturbed at the interface, leading to an efficiency that was not fully optimized. In this work, an additional PC 61 BM layer was inserted between the ZnO ripple and the photoactive layer to enhance the electron extraction. The insertion of additional PC 61 BM layer provided substantial advantages in the operation of inverted BHJ solar cells; specifically, it enhanced current homogeneity and lowered accumulation and trapping of photogenerated charges at the ZnO interface. Inclusion of the additional PC 61 BM layer led to effective quenching of electron-hole recombination by a reduction in the number of accumulated charges at the surface of ZnO ripples. This resulted in a 16% increase in the efficiency of inverted BHJ solar cells to 7.7%, compared to solar cells without the additional PC 61 BM layer.B ulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells based on blends of conjugated polymers and soluble fullerene derivatives have generated strong interest in the field of renewable energy because of the potential they offer to lower manufacturing costs for large area, lightweight devices 1-3 . Since the first BHJ solar cell was reported in 1995 4,5 , the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of BHJ solar cells has gradually improved due to the development of new materials and device architectures, recently reaching over 9% in single junction device [6][7][8] .The inverted device architecture in particular has gained considerable attention in the research community because of its better device stability and advantages in processing over the conventional architecture 9-14 . In the inverted structure, since the polarity of charge collection is the opposite of that in the conventional architecture; the selection of an effective electron extraction/transportation buffer layer, which can effectively build-up the symmetry breaking, is the key component for high performance inverted solar cells 15,16 . Such an electron extraction/transportation buffer layer must be highly transparent, electrically conductive, and energetically wellmatched to the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) level of the acceptor.In order to induce greater light absorption in the photoactive layer, nano-patterning is often applied to the metal-oxide buffer layer, which functions as the electron extraction/transportation layer. Not only on metal-oxide buffer layer, plasticizer assistied soft embossing (PASE) structure have been applied on PEDOT5PSS hole extracting layer to improve solar cell performance 17 . For P3HT5PCBM solar cells based on PASE structured PEDOT5PSS layers the averaged overall power efficiency is improved by up to 18%. Many demonstrations of successful PCE enhancement through improved charge extraction and light absorption due to light scattered by the imprinted patterns have been reported to-date [18][19][20][21] . However, in most cases, t...

In spite of the successful enhancement of the power‐conversion efficiency (PCE) in organic bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells by surface plasmon resonance (SPR), the incorporation of several tens of nanometer‐sized (25–50 nm) metal nanoparticles (NPs) has some limitations to further enhancing the PCE due to concerns related to possibly transferring nonradiative energy and disturbing the interface morphology. Instead of tens of nanometer‐sized metal NPs, here, dodecanethiol stabilized Au nanoclusters (Au:SR, R = the tail of thiolate) with sub‐nm‐sized Au38 cores are incorporated on inverted BHJ solar cells. Although metal NPs less than 5 nm in size do not show any scattering or electric field enhancement of incident light by SPR effects, the incorporation of emissive Au:SR nanoclusters provides effects that are quite similar to those of tens of nanometer‐sized plasmonic metal NPs. Due to effective energy transfer, based on the protoplasmonic fluorescence of Au:SR, the highest performing solar cells fabricated with Au:SR clusters yield a PCE of 9.15%; this value represents an ≈20% increase in the efficiency compared to solar cells without Au:SR nanoclusters.

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We fabricated organic photovoltaic (OPV) based on ZnO ripple structure on indium tin oxide as electroncollecting layers and PTB7-F20 as donor polymer. In addition, atomic layer deposition (ALD) was used for preparing additional ZnO layers on rippled ZnO. Addition of 2 nm-thick ALD-ZnO resulted in enhanced initial OPV performance and stability. Based on photoluminescence results, we suggest that ALD-ZnO layers reduced number of surface defect sites on ZnO, which can act as electron-hole recombination center of OPV, and increased resistance of ZnO towards surface defect formation.

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