Plasmonic Enhanced Organic Solar Cells

Organic bulk-heterojunction solar cells have several good characteristics, such as ease of fabrication, and low-cost materials. However, the bottleneck in their adoption is their much lower efficiency as compared with their silicon counterparts. In our previous work, we demonstrated that by appropriately inserting AuNPs in the OPV device, the efficiency can be increased by 30% and that silanization of ITO positively impacts device performance, where we identified the field enhancement due to AuNPs as the main reason for the increase in the efficiency of the device. In this work, we further investigate the impact of self-assembly of the gold nanoparticles on the efficiency by also considering two other factors which can possibly contribute to the improvement of our structure's performance. One is the change in the substrate's workfunction after silanization, and the other factor is the variations in PEDOT: PSS characteristics due to the AuNPs' plasmonic resonance. We conclude that the AuNPs not only increase the photon absorption efficiency but also increase the conductivity of the surrounding medium (PEDOT: PSS) thereby facilitating charge transport through PEDOT: PSS.