Investigation on Degradation of Polymer Solar Cell

Abstract

Over the last few decades, Bulk Heterojunction Organic photovoltaic devices comprising an intimately mixed donor-acceptor blend have gained serious attention due to their potential forbeing cheap, light weight, flexible and environmentally friendly. In this thesis, P3HT/PCBM bulk heterojunction based organic photovoltaic devices with a normal geometry were investigated systematically. In initial studies we focused on optimization of the electrodes. We made devices with and without ITO. Apart from ITO, a thin layer of the conductive polymer PEDOT:PSS was chosen to be the transparent anode. Different PEDOT:PSS films with different thicknesses were characterized for their conductivity and transmission, work function also calculated with different PEDOT:PSS films. We did the degradation study of these devices and see the effect of PEDOT:PSS films thickness on the performance of ITO free solar cell solar cell. The efficiency organic solar cell has been increased up to 8%, but the life time of these devices is only few hours in open atmosphere which is a measure drawback of organic solar cell. After making and characterizing these devices we saw that the life time of these devices was very low and this thing took our attention towards the degradation study of these devices. So we focused on degradation study of these devices and we found some interesting result after the complete degradation of these devices. The results have been discussed in detail. Key words: Organic Semiconductor, Organic Solar Cell, Bulk Heterojunction