In this talk, I will present the research progress of the organic photovoltaic (OPV) employing photonic nanostructures to boost device performance. There are two major parts: 1. OPV devices incorporated with plasmonic nanostructures; 2. Visibly transparent OPV (TOPV) incorporated with distributed bragg reflecting layer (DBR). 1. There are several approaches to utilize the surface plasmon to enhance the efficiency of the organic photovoltaic device. Firstly, we incorporated gold nano particles (NPs) into both buffer layers (e.g. PEDOT:PSS layer) and the photo-active layer. The plasmon resonance of gold NPs could be easily tuned so as to match with the absorption spectrum of different polymers, and this concept is proved to work well in both large band gap polymer solar cells and low band gap polymer solar cells. Secondly, we studied the surface plasmonic effects of large-area metallic grating on patterned active layer. About 10% of short current density improvement is obtained, and PCE achieves 7.73% for the plasmonic inverted solar cells with the low band gap polymer as the active layer. An observable improvement in PCE is mainly ascribed by the surface plasmonic and scattering effects due to the electrode (Ag) grating. Finally, we combined the above two strategies together and studied the dual plasmonic effect in the polymer solar cells. 2. The visibly transparent OPV (TOPV) has attracted lots of attentions recently due to its unique applications that conventional solar cells fail to deliver. However, the transparency and device efficiency are intrinsically contradicting each other. Here, we solve this problem by incorporating DBR that selectively passes the visible spectrum while reflects the IR spectrum. The TOPV device efficiency increases about 30% with scarifying little visible transparency.

Smart photon management for organic photovoltaic

249th National Meeting (2015)

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