Design of an Efficient PTB7:PC70BM-Based Polymer Solar Cell for 8% Efficiency

Abstract

Polymer semiconductors may have the potential to fully replace silicon in next-generation solar cells because of their advantages such as cheap cost, lightweight, flexibility, and the ability to be processed for very large area applications. Despite these advantages, polymer solar cells are still facing a certain lack of power-conversion efficiency (PCE), which is essentially required for commercialization. Recently, bulk heterojunction of PTB7:PC70BM as an active layer showed remarkable performance for polymer solar cells in terms of PCE. Thus, in this paper, we developed and optimized a novel design using PEDOT:PSS and PFN-Br as electron and hole transport layers (ETL and HTL) for ITO/PEDOT:PSS/PT7B:PC70BM/PFN-Br/Ag as a polymer solar cell, with the help of simulation. The optimized solar cell has a short-circuit current (Isc) of 16.434 mA.cm−2, an open-circuit voltage (Voc) of 0.731 volts, and a fill-factor of 68.055%, resulting in a maximum PCE of slightly above 8%. The findings of this work may contribute to the advancement of efficient bulk-heterojunction-based polymer solar cells.