Optical, Structural and Morphological Properties of Ternary Thin Film Blend of P3HT:PCBM:ZnO Nanoparticles

Abstract

Ternary blend film of conjugated polymer, fullerene and inorganic nanoparticles has intensively studied as active material for high power conversion efficiency (PCE) of hybrid organic-inorganic solar cells. The incorporation of two electron acceptor materials of organic fullerene and inorganic nanoparticles into hybrid with electron donor conjugated polymer is strongly believed can improve the PCE of solar cells by increasing exciton dissociation efficiency due to an increase of interface area between donor and acceptor materials where the positive and negative charges dissociated. We studied optical, structural and morphological properties of ternary thin film containing blend of conjugated polymer poly(3-hexylthiophene (P3HT):fullerene derivative PCBM:Zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-NP) by measuring its optical absorption, crystal structure and film surface morphology. Zinc oxide nanoparticle was prepared by sol-gel method. It has optical absorption below 370 nm and average particle size 40 nm as shown by TEM picture. Ternary thin blend films of P3HT:PCBM:ZnO-NP were prepared by use of spin-coating method. The UV-Vis spectrum of thin film contains absorption peaks originated from contribution of P3HT at wavelengths 520 nm, 550 nm and 600 nm, from contribution of PCBM at 260 nm and 330 nm and from ZnO-NP at wavelengths below 370 nm which confirms that these three materials were well mixed in the films. Its XRD pattern also contains the peaks from each of these three-materials. In this report, we compare surface morphology of thin films of pure P3HT, pure ZnO-NP, blend of P3HT:PCBM, blend of P3HT:ZnO-NP and ternary blend of P3HT:PCBM:ZnO-NP.