| One of many steps to develop a sustainable society is to reduce the use of fossil fuels by replacing them with renewable energy sources, such as solar energy. This dissertation concerns one of the most contemporary methods to harvest solar radiation and covert it to electricity, using thin polymer films.; The photovoltaic devices in this study consisted of a thin layer of p-phenylenevinylene (PPV) based semiconducting polymer sandwiched between two metals (semi-transparent ITO and evaporated metal electrode). Two modified device structures were studied, an interfacial heterojunction device, which includes an additional layer of inorganic n-type semiconductor (Ti-oxides) and a bulk heterojunction device, which is formed by blending electron-attracting materials. Both modifications resulted in higher device performances under ambient conditions due to an increased number of dissociation sites.; From studies of inorganic solar cells, it is well known that temperature has a large effect on device performance. However, there are only a few studies on organic Solar cells, concerning the temperature dependence. This thesis focuses on understanding the temperature dependent behaviors of polymer photovoltaic devices. Temperature dependence study allows us to examine how the device parameters such as short circuit current (Isc) and open circuit voltage (Voc) are affected by the material properties and the device architectures.; The current-voltage relationships were measured in a temperature controlled OXFORD cryostat operating between 150K and 404K. From the dark current-voltage measurements, the field-independent hole mobility (mu0) was extracted, using a space charge limited current analysis. From the photocurrent-voltage measurements, the temperature dependence on Isc, Voc, and fill factor were studied. The temperature characteristics of Isc (T) were compared to that of mu0(T), and two different dependencies were obtained for different device architectures. The temperature dependence of Voc(T) were analyzed using the conventional diode equation developed for the inorganic solar cell studies. Our systematic temperature dependence studies allows us to decouple the effects of the material properties (i.e. mobility) from the effects of the device architectures, and to reexamine the device parameters, which governs the photovoltage generation in organic solar cells. |
