Plasmonically-enhanced absorption in organic solar cells with metal nanostructures

摘要

Considering the potential advantages of organic solar cells over their inorganic counterpart and the promise of plasmonic nanotechnology, an organic solar cell structure with integrated metal nanostructures is proposed and numerically investigated in this work. Incorporation of metal nanostructures in the active layer of a solar cell is a promising approach, as it can potentially induce localized and propagating plasmonic modes, cavity modes and optical scattering, thereby increasing optical absorption and hence conversion efficiency. In this work, the proposed plasmonic-organic solar cell structure (bulk heterojunction organic active layer with integrated metal nanostructures) is theoretically modeled and its performance parameters are evaluated. The investigation is carried out for nanostructures of different materials (silver and gold) and of different shapes (triangular, hexagonal and circular). The results of the analysis show increase in the values of power conversion efficiency and short-circuit current density of these plasmonically-modified organic solar cells. The overall optical absorption is found to be greatly enhanced for such solar cell structures compared to the basic organic solar cell.