Abstract
A low temperature sol-gel process was used to fabricate zinc-oxide and yttrium-doped zinc oxide layers. These zinc-oxide and yttrium-doped ZnO films were used as electron transport layers in conjunction with P3HT and PC16BM type solar cells. It was demonstrated that annealing and doping of electron transport layer influenced the overall organic solar cells performance. Anneals of ~ 150?C provided the highest device performance. Compared to the undoped zinc oxide, the device with yttrium doped zinc oxide layers showed improved efficiency by about 30%. Furthermore an equivalent circuit was proposed to understand the connection between the electrical and optical characteristics of the device. Comparisons between the simulated and experimental current-voltage(I-V) curves displayed only a 1.2% variation between the curves. Clearly, our experimental and simulated studies provide new insight on the equivalent circuit models for inverted organic solar cells and further improvement on photovoltaic efficiency.
Highlights
The economic prosperity and the technological development are the key challenges for the world herself and energy plays the most important roles [1]
The oxygen atom vacancies are filled by prolonged ultraviolet ozone (UVO) treatment which reduces the number of free electrons in the conduction band, which has an adverse effect on the device performance [41]
The organic solar cells (OSCs) utilizing ZnO electron transport layer (ETL) annealed at 50 ̊C exhibited a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 1.3% with a VOC of 0.6 V, a ISC of 1.6 mA, fill factor (FF) of 27.8%
Summary
The economic prosperity and the technological development are the key challenges for the world herself and energy plays the most important roles [1]. In one of our previous studies, we fabricated organic solar cell based on a composite of fullerene derivative [6,6]-phenyl-C61 butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) and regioregular poly (3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) with an added interfacial layer of AgOx in between the PEDOT:PSS layer and the ITO layer. Metal doped n-type buffer layers have been studied by several research groups in order to increase the device performance of inverted solar cells. For OSC, the layers of ITO/PEDOT:PSS act as anode and Al acts as cathode, for inverted organic solar cell (IOSC), the layers of YZO/ITO and Al play the roles of cathode and anode, respectively. High efficiency organic solar cells were fabricated by doping yttrium in the ZnO electron transport layer and utilizing the optimized annealing conditions
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