Recombination in polymer-fullerene bulk heterojunction solar cells

By Sarah R. Cowan, Anshuman Roy, Alan J. Heeger. 2010

1,390 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recombination of photogenerated charge carriers in polymer bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells reduces the short circuit current (Jsc ) and the fill factor (FF). Identifying the mechanism of recombination is, therefore, fundamentally important for increasing the power conversion efficiency. Light intensity and temperature-dependent current-voltage measurements on polymer BHJ cells made from a variety of different semiconducting polymers and fullerenes show that the recombination kinetics are voltage dependent and evolve from first-order recombination at short circuit to bimolecular recombination at open circuit as a result of increasing the voltage-dependent charge carrier density in the cell. The “missing 0.3 V” inferred from comparison of the band gaps of the bulk heterojunction materials and the measured open-circuit voltage at room-temperature results from the temperature dependence of the quasi-Fermi levels in the polymer and fullerene domains—a conclusion based on the fundamental statistics of fermions.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57dc0321231c57fc1c182aa4ab458b770dfe6795

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

  1. G. Bazan
  2. Wei Lin Leong
  3. Alan J. Heeger
  4. D. H. Wang
  5. A. Kyaw
  6. Alex K.-Y. Jen
  7. W. Wong
  8. H. Yip

In Polymers and Plastics

  1. G. Bazan
  2. Wei Lin Leong
  3. Alan J. Heeger
  4. D. H. Wang
  5. Alex K.-Y. Jen
  6. H. Yip
  7. Thuc‐Quyen Nguyen
  8. Yang Yang

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