Design and Optimization of High Performance P3HT: PCBM Polymer Solar Cell Using P3HT Buffer Layer

Abstract

In this paper, a novel structure of multilayer organic photovoltaic cell has been designed and simulated. The integration of Poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl) (P3HT) buffer layer and Poly(9,9-bis(3’-(N,N-dimethyl) N- ethylammoinium propyl-2,7-fluorene)-alt-2,7-(9,9 dioctyl fluorene)) dibromide (PFN:BR) electron transport layer (ETL) in the proposed solar cell has improved the performance significantly. The various performance measuring parameters like power conversion efficiency (PCE), short circuit current (Jsc), open circuit voltage (Voc), fill factor (FF), quantum efficiency (QE) have improved significantly. Furthermore, the effect of different layer thickness, the density of traps $N_{t}$ and temperature on the proposed solar cell has been studied and the optimum value has been obtained. It has been observed that after optimizing the different parameters of the proposed structure, the performance measuring parameters shows an improvement of 14%, 33.3%, 200% and 300% in Voc FF, Jsc and PCE respectively over the reported organic solar cells. Further, a QE of about 90% is achieved in the proposed structure.

Keywords

• Organic solar cell
• energy harvesting
• bulk heterojunction
• buffer layer
• power conversion efficiency
• fill factor