Semi-transparent polymer solar cells

Abstract

Abstract. Over the last three decades, progress in the organic photovoltaic field has resulted in some device features which make organic cells applicable in electricity generation configurations where the standard silicon-based technology is not suitable, for instance, when a semitransparent photovoltaic panel is needed. When the thin film solar cell performance is evaluated in terms of the device's visible transparency and power conversion efficiency, organic solar cells offer the most promising solution. During the last three years, research in the field has consolidated several approaches for the fabrication of high performance semi-transparent organic solar cells. We have grouped these approaches under three categories: devices where the absorber layer includes near-infrared absorption polymers, devices incorporating one-dimensional photonic crystals, and devices with a metal cavity light trapping configuration. We herein review these approaches.

Light Manipulation in Organic Photovoltaics

“…Therefore, the light trapping capability of these DBR geometries can be tuned with respect to the variation of the number of layers and the periodicity in the DBR. As indicated by Martorell et al (Figure 7 d), [ 32,109 ] the photocurrent of a PTB7-based OPV increased rapidly with respect to the increase of layer numbers in the DBR but saturated beyond fi ve layers. More interestingly, non-periodic DBRs used to trap nearinfrared and near-ultraviolet photons exhibited relatively better performance compared to their periodic counterparts, which was attributed to the optimal interference at each wavelength for largest effi ciency while at the same time maintaining a good transparency in most the visible wavelengths.…”

“…Reproduced with permission. [ 109 ] Copyright 2015, SPIE. layer structure can tune the device color without signifi cantly altering cell performance.…”

Fabrication of honeycomb textured glass substrate and nanotexturing of zinc oxide front electrode for its application in high efficiency thin film amorphous silicon solar cell

“…There are two possible ways to enhance light absorption-one is to prepare amorphous silicon material that can have higher optical absorption, while the other is to design the solar cell so that the unabsorbed light is kept trapped for further absorption. [9][10][11][12][13][14] The plasmonic effect of the Ag nanoparticle 15, 16 was also reported in this respect. After that the light-trapping effect on an amorphous silicon solar cell was reported as early as 1985.…”

Improved color rendering index of low band gap semi-transparent polymer solar cells using one-dimensional photonic crystals

“…17 In CIE (1995) definition, the original fourteen test color samples (TCS) are taken from an early edition of the Munsell Atlas. 21 Firstly, we calculated CRI i of the first eight TCSs (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8), and the CRI is the average of CRI i . The CRI i of different devices illuminated from AM 1.5G illumination light source are shown in Fig.…”