Study of the potential energy conversion efficiency of organic solar cells based on donor/acceptor heterojunctions

Organic solar cells can offer an appealing alternative for bulk silicon solar cells due to their attractive properties such as flexibility and possibility to apply low-cost manufacturing techniques. The different types of existing organic solar cells reported in the literature have been critically assessed in terms of performance and processability, based on which it was concluded that the concept of the donor/acceptor bulk heterojunction sandwiched between a transparent and a metal electrode has the most potential. In order to gain more insight into the charge transport properties of spin-cast photovoltaic conjugated polymer/fullerene blends, these films were incorporated into field-effect transistors to derive values for the electron and hole mobilities. Model calculations showed that increasing these mobility values in combination with the use of thicker active layers could significantly enhance the short-circuit current density of the bulk heterojunction solar cells. Optimisation of the charge transport is required and was realised in this study by choosing PPV-oligomers and C₆₀ as well-defined building blocks to construct the donor/acceptor networks. First, these materials were spin-cast in single-layer diodes to allow full electrical characterisation, which was then compared with simulation of the devices in dark as well as under illumination. The photovoltaic performance of blended PPV-oligomer/C₆₀ devices remained rather low due to C₆₀-induced shunting paths and high molecular disorder. In a second part, more morphological order was obtained by using vacuum evaporation to deposit the organic materials. Besides structural characterisation of the evaporated films, the electrical behaviour of single-layer devices was investigated and the influence of interfacial layers was addressed. Photovoltaic devices based on evaporated planar heterojunctions reaching a conversion efficiency of 1.9% and exhibiting an open-circuit voltage of over 1 V were realised. Evaporated bulk heterojunction solar cells were found to tackle the problem of the short exciton diffusion length and an efficiency of 2.0% was measured. Moreover, increasing the light-trapping in the organic film by surface roughening yielded an AM1.5 power conversion efficiency of 2.2%. Finally, suggestions for further improvements regarding performance, stability and processing of organic bulk heterojunction solar cells are outlined.