Neutral-Color Semitransparent Organic Solar Cells with All-Graphene Electrodes

Abstract

Graphene has been considered as a promising material for transparent electrodes due to its advantages including ultrahigh carrier mobilities, high optical transmittance, excellent mechanical flexibility, and good stability. Solar cells with all-graphene electrodes are potentially low-cost, high-performance, and environmental friendly, which however have not been realized until now. Here, we report the fabrication of semitransparent organic photovoltaics (OPVs) with graphene transparent electrodes as both cathode and anode, which can absorb light from both sides with the power conversion efficiency up to 3.4%. Meanwhile, the OPVs have a neutral color and show the transmittance of ∼40% in the visible region, making them suitable for some special applications, such as power-generating windows and building integrated photovoltaics. This work demonstrates the great potential of graphene for the applications in carbon-based optoelectronic devices.

Flexible and Semitransparent Organic Solar Cells

“…The semitransparent OSC with an inverted structure of graphene/ PEDOT:PSS/PTB7:PC 71 BM/ZnO-NP/PEDOT:PSS/graphene/ glass with graphene as both BTE and TTE, showed a PCE up to 3.35% irradiated from either sides of the device with an AVT of ≈40% and with neutral color. [131] Lin et al [132] reported semitransparent OSCs with the structure of glass/ITO/TiO 2 / P3HT:PCBM/PEDOT:PSS/monolayer graphene/Au grid/PET. The hybrid top electrode with monolayer graphene/Au grid on PET substrate showed low sheet resistance of 22 ± 3 Ω sq −1 and high optical transmittance of 81.4%, which is comparable to ITO/glass electrode.…”

Diffusion Length Mapping for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

“…Good agreement was obtained with the integral value of L estimated by an EIS analysis under the same operative conditions, confirming the remarkable setting of SATEM analysis. We believe that these results provide a solid base to extend the technique to different semi-transparent technologies, such as perovskite-based cells [48][49][50] and organic cells [51][52][53]). Unfortunately, a role in transport and recombination can be played by other contributions (for instance drift) that may have to be taken into account for precise collection efficiency modeling [54,55].…”

Graphene-based materials for polymer solar cells

“…Thus, a substitute for ITO with similar performance but lower cost is highly required. In this regard, graphene has been regarded as a promising transparent electrode material due to the high transparency, excellent conductivity, highly flexible nature, and elemental abundance [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39].…”