Proceedings of 13th Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV21)
Publication date: 11th May 2021
Conjugated polymers represent a promising family of semiconductor materials for thin-film organic solar cells (OSCs).[1] Development of efficient large-area photovoltaic modules (PMs) requires the materials with advanced physicochemical and photovoltaic properties, which allow for device upscaling and can be potentially processed through industrial roll-to-roll printing and coating techniques in the future.[2] Recently, we presented a novel (X-DADAD)n-polymer, which demonstrated 9% efficiency in solar cells with PCBM used as acceptor.[3] In this work, we fabricated organic PMs based on the conjugated polymer P3 with an active area of ca. 16 cm2. The devices with inverted configuration of ITO/ZnO/polymer-fullerene blend/MoO3/Ag were processed using slot-die coating method. In order to evaluate the possibility of using the designed PV modules for powering up the wireless devices with low energy consumption, we measured the characteristics of the PMs under different illumination conditions (LED lamp, 4000K).
It can be seen that the output power of the PV module increases with increasing the light intensity. At the light intensity of 250 lux the PM provides 40 µW of power that is sufficient for powering the radio channel smoke detector with the power consumption of 30 µW. Smoke detector was assembled by using ultra low power harvester BQ25570 (Texas Instruments) with MPPT function. A supercapacitor with the capacity of 0.33F was used as an energy storage device.
We also investigated the characteristics of the assembled device at different illumination levels and revealed that it can operate in a fully autonomous regime under indoor conditions with the illumination level of 250 lux.
Thus, the obtained results feature the potential of OSCs based on P3 polymer to be used as tunable energy supplies for powering small wireless sensors under indoor illumination conditions.
The work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (project 18-13-00205P)