The development of low cost, easy processable, barrier encapsulant materials is of critical importance for the rapid commercialization of organic/electronic devices. In this study, flexible and thermally stable composites were prepared by simple solution processing using polyvinyl alcohol as the base polymer matrix and reactive zinc oxide nanoparticles as the dispersed phase. These materials were characterized for their applications as barrier materials for moisture and oxygen sensitive organic devices. Various studies such as thermal analysis, mechanical analysis, surface analysis and permeability studies were used to characterize the composite films for their possible use as a passivation material. The material was used to encapsulate Schottky structured devices, and the performance of these encapsulated devices under accelerated weathering was studied.

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Organic bulk heterojunction solar cells were fabricated under identical experimental conditions, except by varying the solvent polarity used for spin coating the active layer components and their performance was evaluated systematically. Results showed that presence of nitrobenzene-chlorobenzene composition governs the morphology of active layer formed, which is due to the tuning of solvent polarity as well as the resulting solubility of the P3HT:PCBM blend. Trace amount of nitrobenzene favoured the formation of better organised P3HT domains, as evident from conductive AFM, tapping mode AFM and surface, and cross-sectional SEM analysis. The higher interfacial surface area thus generated produced cells with high efficiency. But, an increase in the nitrobenzene composition leads to a decrease in cell performance, which is due to the formation of an active layer with larger size polymer domain networks with poor charge separation possibility.

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