Journal article

Influence of moisture out-gassing from encapsulant materials on the lifetime of organic solar cells

HC Weerasinghe, SE Watkins, N Duffy, DJ Jones, AD Scully

Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells | Published : 2015

Abstract

The results of a study on the effects of encapsulant pre-conditioning (drying) on the durability of "conventional" and "inverted" bulk-heterojunction organic solar cells based on P3HT:PCBM are presented. The architectures of the conventional and inverted devices were ITO/PEDOT:PSS/P3HT:PCBM/Al and ITO/ZnO/P3HT:PCBM/MoO3/Ag, respectively. Quantitative analysis of the moisture content, moisture out-gassing, and re-absorbing properties of flexible barrier encapsulant films under ambient conditions was conducted. The effect of moisture out-gassing from the encapsulation materials on device performance was studied and the lifetime of conventional and inverted devices was found to decline signific..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the CSIRO Manufacturing Flagship and the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium through funding from a Sustainable Energy Research and Development Grant from the Victorian Government Department of Primary Industries, a Victoria Science Agenda Grant from the Victorian Government Department of Business and Innovation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), and the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP). HW acknowledges a Postdoctoral Fellowship from ARENA. The authors also thank Dr Jacek Jasieniak for providing the ZnO nanoparticle solutions and Dr Tadahiko Hirai for assistance with the impedance spectroscopy measurements.