Organic solar cell with inverted device architecture and 8.3% efficiency. |
Imec,
Polyera and international chemical group Solvay have achieved a new
world-record efficiency of 8.3% for polymer-based single junction
organic solar cells in an inverted device stack. These excellent
performance results represent a crucial step towards successful
commercialization of organic photovoltaic cells.
Solar
power is gradually becoming cost-competitive with traditional
mainstream energy sources such as coal, oil, and nuclear. Continued
reduction of manufacturing and installation costs of solar panels will
further drive this cost-competitiveness. Organic solar cells are holding
the promise of addressing these issues, due to their potential to be
manufactured on large-areas at high-throughput, and on lightweight,
flexible substrates (like plastic or textiles), significantly reducing
transportation and installation costs. This, along with optical
translucency, gives organic solar cells the potential to be cheaply
integrated into everything from clothing to building facades and
windows.
Imec
has developed a proprietary inverted bulk heterojunction architecture
for polymer-based solar cells that simultaneously optimizes cell light
management and increases device stability. With this architecture, and a
proprietary Polyera semiconductor in the photoactive layer, a team of
imec and Solvay researchers now announces a certified conversion
efficiency of 8.3%. This is the highest certified efficiency reported to
date in the world for inverted polymer cell architectures.
This
result follows previous reports on imec’s proprietary device
architecture, showing that scalable inverted device architectures are
applicable to a variety of polymer materials. Although further
improvements of efficiency and lifetime are required to bring this
potentially-revolutionary technology to market, inverted device
architectures offer a number of commercially-relevant benefits over
standard architectures. As such, this milestone represents another
advancement towards commercially-viable organic solar panels.
