Abstract
A substantial amount of attention has been paid to the development of transparent electrodes based on graphene and carbon nanotubes (CNTs), owing to their exceptional characteristics, such as mechanical and chemical stability, high carrier mobility, high optical transmittance, and high conductivity. This review highlights the latest works on semitransparent solar cells (SSCs) that exploit graphene- and CNT-based electrodes. Their prominent optoelectronic properties and various fabrication methods, which rely on laminated graphene/CNT, doped graphene/CNT, a hybrid graphene/metal grid, and a solution-processed graphene mesh, with applications in SSCs are described in detail. The current difficulties and prospects for future research are also discussed.
Highlights
Regarding the transparent electrodes that have been widely used in a variety of the optoelectronic devices, the transparent conductive oxides (TCOs)—including indium–tin oxide (ITO)—are still dominant in the market, but their brittleness and expensive fabrication remain a challenge, restricting their potential in many future flexible and wearable applications
There are many challenges to be overcome for the industrialization of both carbon nanotubes (CNTs)- and graphene-based transparent electrodes for numerous optoelectronic applications
The second challenge is creating CNT- and graphene-based transparent electrodes over a large area with reduced costs, which is essential for commercialization
Summary
Semitransparent solar cells (SSCs), which exhibit eye-catching appearances by creating neutraland multi-colors, have recently gained significant interest for their potential use in a variety of applications, such as power-generating windows for buildings and vehicles, high-efficiency tandem solar cells, power-generating color filters for displays, and wearable electronics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. To resolve the challenges of the thin metals as the top electrodes, various transparent conductive oxides, such as indium–tin oxide (ITO), indium–zinc oxide (IZO), and aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO), have been employed Such transparent conductive oxides present high transparency and high conductivity as compared to the thin metals, high temperature during a deposition and a post annealing step is required, which can damage the underlying photoactive layer. CNTs and graphene have received increasing attention because of their excellent optoelectronic properties, such as their high optical transparency, low sheet resistance, and high mobility They exhibit mechanical flexibility, environmental stability, and a low cost, showing great promise for transparent electrodes.
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