Abstract
Organic solar cells have unique properties that make them very attractive as a renewable energy source. Of particular interest are semi-transparent cells, which have the potential to be integrated into building façades yet not completely block light. However, making organic cells transparent limits the metal electrode thickness to a few nanometres, drastically reducing its reflectivity and the device photon-harvesting capacity. Here, we propose and implement an ad hoc path for light-harvesting recovery to bring the photon-to-charge conversion up to almost 80% that of its opaque counterpart. We report semi-transparent PTB7:PC71BM cells that exhibit 30% visible light transmission and 5.6% power conversion efficiency. Non-periodic photonic crystals are used to trap near-infrared and near-ultraviolet photons. By modifying the layer structure it is possible to tune the device colour without significantly altering cell performance.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge support from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (grants MAT2011-28665, IPT-120000-2010-29, IPT-2012-0986-120000 and CSD2007-00046).
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R.B. and P.R.-G. contributed equally in the optical simulation, design and fabrication of the transparent organic cells, including the non-periodic photonic crystal. R.B., P.R.-G., A.M.-O. and X.E. contributed to the optimization and fabrication of the organic devices. R.B., P.R.-G., A.M.-O. and M.M. contributed to the fabrication of the transparent electrode. The project was planned and supervised by J.M. The manuscript was written by J.M. with the assistance of all other authors.
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Betancur, R., Romero-Gomez, P., Martinez-Otero, A. et al. Transparent polymer solar cells employing a layered light-trapping architecture. Nature Photon 7, 995–1000 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.276
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.276
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