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Harnessing the Role of Charge Transport Layers for Efficient Design of PBDBT/ITIC-OE Based Organic Solar Cell

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Abstract

Fullerene-free organic solar cells having high dielectric constant acceptor material ITIC-OE hold a great deal of promise for breakthroughs in organic photovoltaics research in the future. In this paper, the impact of electron transport layers and hole transport layers on non fullerene acceptor based bulk heterojunction organic solar cell with device structure: FTO/ETL/PBDB-T:ITIC-OE/HTL/Au has been examined using the solar cell capacitance simulator. The device structure has been investigated with different ETLs such as TiO2, ZnO, and ZnOS, as well as HTLs such as CuI, CuSCN, and Cu2O. The investigations have shown that ZnOS and Cu2O have been shown to be the most effective ETL and HTL for the proposed structure, having values of VOC, JSC, FF and PCE as 1.1313 V, 13.86 mAcm-2, 79.81% and 12.52% respectively. Further, absorber layer has been optimized in terms of its thickness (250 nm) and density of defects (1012 cm−3). The optimization of interfacial layers resulted in optimized thickness of ETL as 50 nm and HTL as 150 nm. When simulation is performed by using improved parameters, the photovoltaic parameters of the proposed device are found to be significantly improved, having values of VOC, JSC, FF and PCE as 1.1241 V, 21.01 mAcm-2, 85.14%, and 20.12% respectively.

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Acknowledgements

Prof. Marc Burgelman of the University of Gent, Belgium, has been very generous in sharing the SCAPS-1D Software, for which the authors are quite grateful. Ayush Tara has been given a University Research Scholarship (RA/SA/URS-PhD/245/22/1872-74) to support his doctorate studies at the University of Jammu.

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  1. Department of Electronics, University of Jammu, Jammu, 180006, Jammu and Kashmir, India

    Ayush Tara, Susheel Sharma & Rockey Gupta

  2. Department of Physics, School of Sciences, Cluster University of Jammu, Jammu, 180001, Jammu and Kashmir, India

    Vishal Bharti

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Tara, A., Bharti, V., Sharma, S. et al. Harnessing the Role of Charge Transport Layers for Efficient Design of PBDBT/ITIC-OE Based Organic Solar Cell. Trans. Electr. Electron. Mater. 24, 356–364 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42341-023-00456-6

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