imec to Present High-Performance Organic Solar Cell at PVSEC Conference

imec, in collaboration with Solvay and Plextronics, will present a single-junction photovoltaic cell based on an organic polymer at the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition (PVSEC) to be held in Hamburg. The solar cell features performance of 6.9% in a novel inverted device stack.

Inverted architectures help increase the lifespan of organic solar cells. By integrating improvements in architecture and active layer optimization with new polymer types, imec focuses on making the organic photovoltaic technology market-ready. A high level of efficiency was achieved by integrating the inverted device architecture of imec with the polymers from Plextronics. By incorporating the polymer into a module, a 5% efficiency at the module level was achieved for 25cm² of aperture area.

Imec’s inverted bulk heterojunction enhanced the performance of the device by 0.5% compared to that of existing architectures for organic photovoltaic cells. A buffer layer was introduced in the active layer to maximize the device’s light management. This architecture along with the p-type, low band-gap polymer from Plextronics, led to a 6.9% conversion efficiency, which is claimed to be the highest efficiency achieved for this polymer material and also for inverted architectures. The polymer material has a fullerene derivate. This novel architecture provides such performance boosts while using other polymer materials also.

Imec’s R&D Team Leader for Organic Photovoltaics, Tom Aernouts commented that the polymer material and the architecture can be further optimized by several methods, one of which is introducing a multi-junction with multiple layers of various polymers, each of which capture different parts in the light spectrum. He added that with such optimizations the lifespan of organic solar cells can be enhanced to more than 10 years.