As energy depletion and environmental pollution problems are intensified, research has been conducted actively on alternative energy sources, an eco-friendly and continuous available energy conversion system. So has been organic solar cells whose efficiency is improved to 18.32%. The photoactive layer inside the solar cell is composed of a donor and a acceptor, and the combination of materials capable of effectively exchanging electrons greatly affects the efficiency of the organic solar cell. Accordingly, various researches have been conducted to improve the efficiency, and the maximum efficiency could be achieved by a solar cell with high carrier generation and low charge recombination characteristics through the introduction of a non-fullerene acceptor and material reconstruction. Organic solar cells are still difficult to commercialize due to their efficiency limitations and light stability, but if a photoactive layer consisting of a donor capable of efficiently absorbing long-wavelength light and an acceptor capable of forming an appropriate energy level is designed, the efficiency of the organic solar cell will reach 20%.
The power conversion efficiency of organic polymer solar cells was enhanced by introducing a ferroelectric polymer layer at the interface between active layer and metal electrode. The power conversion efficiency was increased by 50% through the enhancement of the open circuit voltage. To investigate the role of the ferroelectric layer on the dissociation process of the excitons, non-radiative portion of the exciton decay was directly measured by using photoacoustic technique. The results show that the ferroelectric nature of the buffer layer does not play any roles on the dissociation process of the excitons, which indicates the efficiency enhancement is not due to the ferroelectricity of the buffer layer.
P3HT:PCBM bulk heterojunction solar cells added with ferroelectric polymer were fabricated and characterized. By incorporating P3HT:PCBM solar cell with P(VDF-TrFE) ferroelectric additive, the power conversion efficiency was increased up to nearly 50%. Photoacoustic analysis on this phenomena was carried out for the first time. Through this study, we find that the ferroelectricity of the polymer additive plays the key role in the enhancement of the power conversion efficiency of the organic solar cell by suppressing the non-radiative recombination of charge transfer exciton more effectively.