Numerical Simulation and Performance Optimization of Organic Solar Cell with Improved Efficiency

Abstract

Organic solar cells (OSCs) are considered one of the most important upcoming photovoltaic technologies. Enhancing the overlap between absorption spectra of OSCs and solar spectrum is one way to boost their performance. In this work an organic solar cell is introduced and characterized which uses P3HT:PCBM(Donor-poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl): Accepter-[6,6]PhenylC61butyricacidmethylester)andPTB7:PC70BM(DonorPoly[[4,8bis[(2ethylhexyl)oxy]benzo[1,2b:4,5b’]dithiophene2,6diyl][3fluoro2[(2ethylhexyl)carbonyl]Thieno[3,4b]thiophenediyl]]:Accepter-[6,6]-Phenyl-C70-butyric acid methyl ester) as photoactive absorbing layer respectively. Throughout the work, a 3D software simulation called GPVDM is used to model J-V characteristics for various designs. Tandem organic solar structures were implemented to increase performance even further. An illumination level of 1000 W/m2 (AM1.5G standard) and a concentration level of 1 Sun is considered for all the simulation in the work. The top and bottom subcells' active layer thicknesses were varied to optimize the design. Using different materials for the HTL , ETL , and intermediate layer strengthened our structure even further the change in efficiency was plotted against a single increasing parameter, with all other parameters held constant. After analyzing those curves, we reached the optimum thickness for top front sub cell 330nm and lower bottom sub cell 55nm and the final design is proposed which yields power conversion efficiency 11.11% .We also discussed about the potential improvisations of our design that we are optimistic about.