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Experimental Studies of Plasmonic Nanoparticle Effects on Organic Solar Cells

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Organic Solar Cells

Part of the book series: Green Energy and Technology ((GREEN))

Abstract

The incorporation of plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) into different layers of organic solar cells (OSCs) is studied in this chapter. First, we incorporate NPs into the hole collection layer of OSCs. The resulting improvements in Power Conversion Efficiency (PCE) are found to originate mainly from improvement in hole collection efficiency, while Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR) effects are found to have negligible effect on active layer absorption. Next, we incorporate NPs into the active layer of OSCs. In this case, the absorption of the active layer improves, but we also showed that consideration of electrical properties including carrier mobility, exciton dissociation efficiency, and active layer morphology is required to account for the PCE trend. In both studies, we theoretically show that the very strong near field of NPs is found to distribute laterally along the layer in which the NPs are incorporated in, and hence leading to active layer absorption improvements only when NPs are incorporated into the active layer. Lastly, we incorporated NPs into both active layer and hole collection layer in which the accumulated effects of NPs in the different layers achieved ~22 % improvement in PCE as compared to the optimized control OSCs using poly(3-hexylthiophene): phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT:PCBM) as the active layer.

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  1. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

    Dixon D. S. Fung & Wallace C. H. Choy

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  1. Dixon D. S. Fung
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  2. Wallace C. H. Choy
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Correspondence to Wallace C. H. Choy .

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  1. , Department of Electrical & Electronic, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China, People's Republic

    Wallace C.H. Choy

Appendix A

Appendix A

The electrical properties of OSCs with Au NPs in the active layer of PFSDCN: PCBM [35] have been theoretically studied by solving the organic semiconductor equations involving Poisson, drift–diffusion, and continuity equations [42, 46, 59]. The field-dependent mobility uses the Frenkel-Poole form μ = μ 0 ·exp(F/F 0 ). The Braun-Onsager model is employed for the exciton dissociation. The boundary conditions for ohmic or schottky contacts are also taken into account.

Due to the very thin active layer (~65 nm), it can be assumed the generation rate of bound electron–hole pairs (G max ) is uniform. G max can be obtained from the measured absorption spectra. The electron and hole mobilities can be obtained by fitting the J–V curves of the measured electron- and hole-only devices following the SCLC model. The HOMO is −5.32 eV as measured by cyclic voltammetry (CV) method and the LUMO is −3.27 eV calculated from HOMO level and optical bandgap. The exciton decay rate (k F ) of exciton and charge separation distance (a) can be fitted to make our theoretical J-V curves best fit to the experimental J-V curves

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Fung, D.D., Choy, W.C. (2013). Experimental Studies of Plasmonic Nanoparticle Effects on Organic Solar Cells. In: Choy, W. (eds) Organic Solar Cells. Green Energy and Technology. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4823-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4823-4_8

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