New ultra-thin organic solar cell is efficient and durable

The development of the novelty was carried out by a scientific group from a Japanese university RIKEN in close cooperation with international partners. Together, they managed to create an ultra-thin organic solar cell that is not only durable, but also highly efficient.

How the element was created

The scientists published the results of their research in Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences. So in the published material, the scientists said that such efficiency was achieved thanks to the use of a semiconducting polymer for the donor layer, created by Toray Industries, Inc.

To create such a highly efficient organic panel, a simple annealing process was used at a temperature of 90 degrees Celsius, followed by heating the workpiece at a temperature of 150 degrees.

Heating up at such a high temperature turned out to be an extremely important moment in the entire technological process. Indeed, thanks to this, it was possible to create a stable interface between the layers of the organic solar cell.

As a result of such manipulations, it was possible to obtain an organic flexible cell that decomposes by no more than 5% after 3000 hours of active work.

In this case, the efficiency of the created element was 13%.

Organic solar cells are one of the promising directions for the development of solar panels. But until now, the main problem of such products was their relatively low efficiency, barely reaching 10% (for comparison, classic silicon panels have an efficiency of up to 25%). And even the first samples of organic panels quickly decomposed.

But thanks to the new technology, it was possible to stabilize and slow down the decomposition process as much as possible and significantly increase efficiency.

And the low cost and the ability to apply an ultra-thin film on various surfaces opens up broad prospects for the use of new organic solar panels.

In particular, according to K. Fukuda (one of the authors of the study), the new organic panels can be used in mobile wearable electronics and all kinds of sensors.

Scientific research was published on the portal pnas.

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