Recent Advances in Organic Solar Cells

By Thomas Kietzke. 2007

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Solar cells based on organic semiconductors have attracted much attention. The thickness of the active layer of organic solar cells is typically only 100 nm thin, which is about 1000 times thinner than for crystalline silicon solar cells and still 10 times thinner than for current inorganic thin film cells. The low material consumption per area and the easy processing of organic semiconductors offer a huge potential for low cost large area solar cells. However, to compete with inorganic solar cells the efficiency of organic solar cells has to be improved by a factor of 2-3. Several organic semiconducting materials have been investigated so far, but the optimum material still has to be designed. Similar as for organic light emitting devices (OLED) small molecules are competing with polymers to become the material of choice. After a general introduction into the device structures and operational principles of organic solar cells the three different basic types (all polymer based, all small molecules based and small molecules mixed with polymers) are described in detail in this review. For each kind the current state of research is described and the best of class reported efficiencies are listed.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97b9ee921f79b31381f79ed38df7a2c74a7aa6cf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. P. Hopkins
2. Enkeleda Dervishi
3. A. Biris
4. Omar Abdulrazzaq
5. Shawn Bourdo
6. Viney Saini

In Polymers and Plastics

1. P. Hopkins
2. Enkeleda Dervishi
3. A. Biris
4. Omar Abdulrazzaq
5. Shawn Bourdo
6. Viney Saini

Citations in the corpus

• Organic Solar Cells: A Review of Materials, Limitations, and Possibilities for Improvement (2013, background): “The diffusion length of organic semiconductors is very low, even for those demonstrating high conductivity; the transport process in organic materials is governed by hopping transport while in inorganic semiconductors the phenomenon is described by band transport (Kietzke 2007).”
• Thermal Transport across Solid Interfaces with Nanoscale Imperfections: Effects of Roughness, Disorder, Dislocations, and Bonding on Thermal Boundary Conductance (2013, background): “ese thermoelectric solutions combined with “renewable source” technologies (technologies that do not rely on coal as a fuel—such as photovoltaics [9, 10]) could substantially reduce the carbon footprint of the energy grid.”