Organic solar cell boasts best efficiency yet
1 min read
Belgian research centre imec, Plextronics and Solvay have developed an organic polymer based single junction solar cell with an efficiency of 6.9%. The cell, which combines imec's scalable inverted device architecture and Plextronics' polymers, is said to offer new levels of cell efficiency. The polymer has also been integrated into a module with an efficiency of 5% for an aperture area of 25cm².
The dedicated inverted bulk heterojunction architecture developed by imec has brought a 0.5% improvement in device performance over standard architectures used for organic solar cells.
A buffer layer has been included in the active layer to optimise light management. This, combined with Plextronics' low band gap p-type polymer with a fullerene derivate, has resulted in the highest efficiency yet reported for inverted architectures.
Inverted architectures are being developed as a way to extend the lifetime of organic solar cells. By combining architecture improvements with optimisations to the active layer using different types of polymers, imec aims at bring organic photovoltaic technology to the market.
Tom Aernouts, imec's organic photovoltaics R&D team leader, noted: "With further optimisations to the material, as well as to the architecture – for example, by introducing a multijunction featuring different layers of different polymers, each capturing another part of the light spectrum – we envision organic solar cell lifetimes of more than 10 years and conversion efficiencies of 10% in two to three years."
