Plasmonic metal-oxide core-shell nanoparticles for enhanced power conversion efficiency of organic solar cells

摘要

The current photovoltaic industry is dominated by silicon solar cells, whose development is limited by high costs of manufacturing processes. The search for easy low-temperature fabrication techniques has spurred the development of solar cells based on organic semiconductor polymers. Organic semiconducting polymers have a high coefficient of absorption, but short carrier path lengths which necessitate the fabrication of thin layers for optimal power generation. The introduction of plasmonic effects in these organic solar cells leads to an increase in the optical path length of the incident light in the active layer, thereby increasing the short circuit current density. In this work, an organic solar cell is presented, which contains metal-oxide core-shell plasmonic nanoparticles. Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modeling has been used to simulate the models of light interaction with the organic solar cells containing different metal@oxide (i.e. core-shell nanoparticles with a metallic core and an oxide shell) nanoparticle composites. The different parameters of the nanoparticle composites in the organic solar cells were varied to the study of the absorption enhancement in the active layer medium. The results, thus obtained for enhanced performance, were used for the chemical synthesis of the metal@oxide nanoparticle composites and fabrication of organic solar cells with high power conversion efficiency.