Prediction of power conversion efficiency parameter of inverted organic solar cells using artificial intelligence techniques

Abstract

Organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells are at the forefront of sustainable energy generation due to their lightness, flexibility, and low production costs. These characteristics make OPVs a promising solution for achieving sustainable development goals. However, predicting their lifetime remains challenging task due to complex interactions between internal factors such as material degradation, interface stability, and morphological changes, and external factors like environmental conditions, mechanical stress, and encapsulation quality. In this study, we propose a machine learning-based technique to predict the degradation over time of OPVs. Specifically, we employ multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks to predict the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of inverted organic solar cells (iOSCs) made from the blend PTB7-Th:PC 70 BM, with PFN as the electron transport layer (ETL), fabricated under an N2 environment. We evaluate the performance of the proposed technique using several statistical metrics, including mean squared error (MSE), root mean squared error (rMSE), relative squared error (RSE), relative absolute error (RAE), and the correlation coefficient (R). The results demonstrate the high accuracy of our proposed technique, evidenced by the minimal error between predicted and experimentally measured PCE values: 0.0325 for RSE, 0.0729 for RAE, 0.2223 for rMSE, and 0.0541 for MSE using the LSTM model. These findings highlight the potential of proposed models in accurately predicting the performance of OPVs, thus contributing to the advancement of sustainable energy technologies.