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Rational Device Design for Highly Efficient Organic Photovoltaic Solar Cells
Abstract
Abundant, scalable, environmentally-friendly organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology is increasingly promising in recent years. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of OPVs has been raised to around 10%. However, this record efficiency is still far below the Shockley-Quasar limit of 22~27%. This dissertation introduces great research effort to improve the OPV device efficiency by understanding the device physics, and engineering the donor/acceptor interfaces as well as designing new device architectures. The research activities mainly focused on: 1) Understanding the physical mechanism of open circuit voltage in OPVs; 2) Optimizing the band offset between the donor and the acceptor by using ultrathin ferroelectric dipole layer between donor/acceptor interfaces; 3) Designing fullerene based Schottky-barrier junction structure to obtain large open circuit voltage of round 0.9 V; 4) Applying thermally-annealed bilayer heterojunction structure to improve OPV device performance and demonstrating the origin of the improvement is due to reduced bimolecular charge recombination loss; 5) Studying the ferromagnetism of model photovoltaic materials poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM), which might open up another approach to improve P3HT:PCBM based organic solar cells by using external magnetic fields, and also might initiate the applications of multifunctional organic optoelectronics with integration of electronics, photonics, and magnetics.
Subject Area
Condensed matter physics|Materials science
Recommended Citation
Yang, Bin, "Rational Device Design for Highly Efficient Organic Photovoltaic Solar Cells" (2013). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI3603842.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3603842