Complete Solution-Processed Semitransparent and Flexible Organic Solar Cells: A Success of Polyimide/Ag-Nanowires- and PH1000-Based Electrodes with Plasmonic Enhanced Light Absorption

• Published in: Nanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 12; no. 22; p. 3987
• Main Authors: Wang, Jing, Liang, Xiangfei, Xie, Jianing, Yin, Xiaolong, Chen, Jinhao, Gu, Tianfu, Mo, Yueqi, Zhao, Jianqing, Liu, Shumei, Yu, Donghong, Zhang, Jibin, Hou, Lintao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 12-11-2022; MDPI
• Subjects: Absorption; Ag nanowires; Boundary conditions; Conducting polymers; Electrodes; Electromagnetic absorption; Energy conversion efficiency; Fabrication; Flexibility; flexible; Glass substrates; Light; Light transmittance; Nanotechnology; Nanowires; Optical properties; organic solar cells; Photon absorption; Photovoltaic cells; Photovoltaics; Plasma; plasmonic; Plasmonics; polyimide; Polyimide resins; Polymers; semitransparent; Silver; Solar batteries; Solar cells; Solar energy; Solar energy industry; Weight reduction; Work functions; Zinc oxides; China; Germany; organic solar cells; semitransparent; polyimide; Ag nanowires; flexible; plasmonic
• ISSN: 2079-4991; 2079-4991
• DOI: 10.3390/nano12223987

Organic solar cells (OSCs) have been widely studied due to the advantages of easy fabrication, low cost, light weight, good flexibility and sufficient transparency. In this work, flexible and semitransparent OSCs were successfully fabricated with the adoption of both polyimide/silver nanowires (PI/AgNW) and a conducting polymer PEDOT:PSS named PH1000 as the transparent conductive electrodes (TCEs). It is demonstrated that PI/AgNW is more suitable as a cathode rather than an anode in the viewpoint of its work function, photovoltaic performance, and simulations of optical properties. It is also found that the light incidence from PH1000 TCE can produce more plasmonic-enhanced photon absorption than the PI/AgNW electrode does, resulting in more high power conversion efficiency. Moreover, a high light transmittance of 33.8% and a decent efficiency of 3.88% are achieved for the whole all-flexible semitransparent device with only 9% decrease of resistance in PI/AgNW after 3000 bending cycles. This work illustrates that PI/AgNW has great potential and bright prospect in large-area OSC applications in the future.