Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV14)
Publication date: 1st March 2014
Hybrid solar cells based on crystalline silicon have received an increasing amount of scientific attention in the recent time. These devices combine promising efficiencies of more than 10 %[1,2] with the advantage of low-cost solution processing of organic polymer materials. In this study we compare highly efficient devices with three different polymers on crystalline silicon to investigate the influence of oxygen in the side groups of the polythiophene layers. The inorganic part of the solar cells is optimized with a hole-selective back contact (BSF) and a low defect density hot water oxide (Dit=2×10-12 eV-1cm-2), which provides the necessary wetting properties for the solution processed emitter layers. The applied polymer materials, poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl) (P3HT), poly(3-[3,6-dioxaheptyl]-thiophene) (P3DOT), and poly(3-[2,5,8-trioxanonyl]-thiophene) (P3TOT), differ mainly in the amount of ether groups in the alkyl side chains of the organic semiconductors (see Fig. 1). Incorporation of ether groups into the alkyl side chains attached to the thiophene rings led to a modified layer formation during the spin coating process of the respective polymers. The emitter layers of the P3TOT/Si interface were homogeneous and thinner than 15 nm, and resulted in efficiencies close to 10% for a planar device. The organic layers were characterized regarding their optical and structural properties using UV/VIS-measurement, atomic force microscopy and X-ray diffraction measurements and the results are connected to the device key figures. The short circuit current and the open circuit voltage raised with the number of oxygen atoms in the sequence P3HT (jSC=15.2 mA cm-2, VOC=0.3 V), P3DOT (jSC=21.4 mA cm-2, VOC=0.46 V), P3TOT (jSC =28.3 mA cm-2, VOC=0.5 V). The improvement was achieved by a slight modification of a well-known, abundant material and shows the potential of this approach for further optimization towards photovoltaic devices.
Thiophene based polymers with different amount of ether groups in the side chains.
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