Heat-Insulating Multifunctional Semitransparent Polymer Solar Cells

By Chen Sun, Ruoxi Xia, Hui Shi, H. Yao, Xiang Liu, Jianhui Hou, Fei Huang, H. Yip, Yong Cao. Joule, 2018

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Semitransparent organic photovoltaics (ST-OPVs) have attracted extensive attention due to their potential for integration into the windows of buildings. Herein, we propose a dual-functional ST-OPV device that is not only highly efficient but also very effective for heat insulation. By introducing non-fullerene acceptor with enhanced near-infrared absorption and distributed Bragg reflectors for selectively enhancing the transmittance in visible wavelengths while keeping high reflectance for near-infrared light, the ST-OPVs generate over 6% power conversion efficiency with high visible light transmission of over 25% and outstanding infrared radiation rejection rate of over 80%. Our results show that with proper design of ST-OPVs, they can be used not only for generating power from sunlight but also for solar shading and heat insulation, which opens up a new application of OPVs for both energy harvesting and saving.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be8bd4e46990c1af86be8935b0bf9e3e65bd8414