Abstract
One of the issues in the organic solar-cell technology that needs attention before mass production is its low long-term stability. These devices need often to be exposed to the light to improve their photovoltaic properties. This effect, known as light soaking, is the cause of challenges related to correct measurements and proper determination of the device lifetime. Lifetime determination and investigation of failure mechanisms of solar-cell devices require reliable measurement approaches. This paper presents the systematic studies on proper analysis of degradation dynamics of organic solar cells (OSCs) taking into account the light-soaking effect. Five groups of organic solar-cell annealed at various conditions (110°C to 170°C and nonannealed) were under investigation for 100 days. Measurement procedure for proper investigation of light-soaking effect is proposed. Solar-cell efficiency improvement, due to light-soaking effect, in range 8% to 27% was observed for as fabricated devices. After 100 days of study, the light soaking-related efficiency improvement increased up to over 100% of initial efficiency. Device lifetimes strongly depend on measurement methods, which were applied. Our results show the importance of taking into account the changes in magnitude of the light-soaking effect in measurements and degradation studies of OSCs.
Highlights
Solution-processed organic solar cells (OSCs) have gained serious attention in the past few years due to unique advantages as follows: low-cost, high throughput roll-to-roll production, semitransparency, lightweight, and flexibility.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] Bulk-heterojunction solution-processed OSC with certified efficiency up to 9.57% was achieved.[11]
Inverted OSCs provide better stability compared to conventional structure, due to following modifications: replace the Al metal contact with Ag metal contact to prevent oxidation and remove PEDOT:PSS away from the indium tin-oxide (ITO) surface to prevent etching of ITO.[15,16,17,18]
The measurement procedure used for the presented analysis of light-soaking effect, delivers information on the duration of light-soaking illumination for saturation of photovoltaic properties, photodegradation due to illumination used for light soaking (LS), and the most important thing for degradation aspect, i.e., the variation of improvement due to light-soaking effect during the degradation time
Summary
Solution-processed organic solar cells (OSCs) have gained serious attention in the past few years due to unique advantages as follows: low-cost, high throughput roll-to-roll production, semitransparency, lightweight, and flexibility.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] Bulk-heterojunction solution-processed OSC with certified efficiency up to 9.57% was achieved.[11]. The measurement procedure used for the presented analysis of light-soaking effect, delivers information on the duration of light-soaking illumination for saturation of photovoltaic properties, photodegradation due to illumination used for LS, and the most important thing for degradation aspect, i.e., the variation of improvement due to light-soaking effect during the degradation time. These studies and analyses were performed for cells of varying quality and have been held for 100 days
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