Ultrafast screening method for assessing the photostability of thin-film solar cells

Commercial success of optoelectronical devices such as solar cells depend strongly on lifetime next to production costs and power conversion efficiency. While a steep decrease in production costs and significant increase in efficiency have been achieved, lifetime still plays often a limiting factor, in particular, in case of highly innovative new device types. Lifetime tests measuring the stability of devices without external influences (i.p. water) generally take very long time due to the required long lifetime of optoelectronical devices. We established a novel accelerated lifetime test (ALT) setup which may increase the test speed by a factor of several hundred. We verified the setup and the applicability of our ALT measurement routine with an experiment on a well-studied innovative thin-film solar cell type (P3HT:PCBM).