Abstract
Energy consumption has increased exponentially over the last decades. This fact reflects the price of the electrical energy. Consequently, the scientific community has concentrated on generation procedures from renewable sources. In this sense, the efficiency of conventional photovoltaic cells and the emergence of new organic and hybrid materials have substantially improved photovoltaic generation and its Power Conversion Efficiency (PCE). The interest in organic cells has been justified by their beneficial properties: ease of processing, low cost, flexibility, and low weight. Recently, the increasing PCE evolution has been higher than that of the classical technologies, reaching values up to 17.5%. Notwithstanding that, there are still several challenges to deal with. Amongst them, there is the lifetime of these devices. In certain contexts, the fabrication conditions and their associated parameters constrain the time degradation of the physical properties of the organic device. This study assessed how time degradation affects organic cells, in which certain fabrication parameters were varied. In particular, this work evaluated cells with the following structure: ITO/PEDOT:PSS/P3HT:PCBM/Al. The analysis focused on parameters such as PEDOT:PSS solution volume, P3HT:PCBM solution ratio, solution temperature, and layered dopants. The results obtained in terms of PCE, Voc, and Isc provide insights on the possible dependences for the lifetime degradation. Finally, in light of the results, this work proposed several analytical models that aid in the fitting of the degradation curves for the studied materials and their fabrication parameters.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, D.V. and F.R.-M.; methodology, D.V., F.R.-M., J.J.G., R.T. and P.C. ; software, D.V. and R.T.; validation, F.R.-M., J.J.G. and P.C.; formal analysis, D.V., F.R.-M.; investigation, F.R.-M., J.C.F., J.L.A.; resources, J.C.F. and S.F.d.Á.; data curation, D.V., F.R.-M.; writing—original draft preparation, D.V., R.T. and F.R.-M.; writing—review and editing, D.V., F.R.-M. and S.F.d.Á.; visualization, J.C.F. and P.C.; supervision, J.C.F. and S.F.d.Á.; project administration, D.V. and F.R.-M.; funding acquisition, D.V. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by the research project no. CIGE/2021/15 funded by the Valencian Council of Innovation, University, Science and and Digital Society.
Data Availability Statement
Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. |
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).