Fully solution-processed, light-weight, and ultraflexible organic solar cells

Güler, Ezgi Nur; Distler, Andreas; Brabec, Christoph J; Basu, Robin; Egelhaaf, Hans-Joachim

doi:10.1088/2058-8585/ac66ae

Journal Article

FZJ-2022-03265

Fully solution-processed, light-weight, and ultraflexible organic solar cells

Güler, E. N. (Corresponding author) ; Distler, A. (Corresponding author) ; Basu, R. ; Brabec, C. J.FZJ* ; Egelhaaf, H.-J.FZJ*

2022
IOP Publishing Philadelphia, PA

Flexible and printed electronics 7(2), 025003 - (2022) [10.1088/2058-8585/ac66ae]

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Please use a persistent id in citations: http://hdl.handle.net/2128/32841 doi:10.1088/2058-8585/ac66ae

Abstract: Organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices have the potential to be superior to other PV technologies forthe use in applications that require very high flexibility or maximum specific power(power-per-weight ratio), such as textile integration, wearable electronics, or outer spaceapplications. However, OPV devices also require encapsulation by barrier films to reduce thedegradation driven by extrinsic factors, which in turn limits their flexibility and leads to lowerspecific power values. In this work, fully solution-processed (including both electrodes)semitransparent organic solar cells (OSCs) with performance comparable with conventionalindium tin oxide-based devices are processed directly onto different barrier films of varyingthicknesses. Direct cell fabrication onto barrier films leads to the elimination of the additionalpolyethylene terephthalate substrate and one of the two adhesive layers in the final stack of anencapsulated OPV device by replacing the industrial state-of-the-art sandwich encapsulation witha top-only encapsulation process, which yields significantly thinner and lighter ‘product-relevant’PV devices. In addition to the increase of the specific power to 0.38 W g−1, which is more than fourtimes higher than sandwich-encapsulated devices, these novel OSCs exhibit better flexibility andsurvive 5000 bending cycles with 4.5 mm bending radius. Moreover, the devices show comparablestability as conventionally encapsulated devices under constant illumination (1 sun) in ambient airfor 1000 h. Finally, degradation under damp heat conditions (65 ◦C, 85% rh) was investigated andfound to be determined by a combination of different factors, namely (UV) light soaking, intrinsicbarrier properties, and potential damaging of the barriers during (laser) processing.

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