Speaker
Nadia Camaioni
(CNR-ISOF, Bologna (Italy))
Description
Recently, polymer or ‘plastic’ solar cells have attracted significant interest due to their potential for cheaper generation of electricity compared with conventional inorganic solar cells.1 This expectation is based on simple device structure and on inexpensive wet-processes such as screen printing, ink-jet printing, spray coating, etc. Other advantages of plastic solar cells are low specific-weight, mechanical flexibility, and easy tenability of chemical properties of organic materials.
To date, most of high efficiency polymer solar cells employ a bulk heterojunction 2 nanostructure made of an electron-donating conjugated polymer and an electron-accepting soluble fullerene. Currently, the efficiency that can be reached with this kind of cells exceeds 7%,3 while the predictions of the theoretically and practically accessible power conversion efficiencies are indicated to be around twice that value or even more for tandem device structure.4
In this lecture, some basics as well as the recent developments in this novel photovoltaic technology are presented.
Author
Nadia Camaioni
(CNR-ISOF, Bologna (Italy))
