Paper
12 May 2006 Flexible encapsulation for organic solar cells
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Abstract
Efficient organic photovoltaic devices show many interesting properties, but share a common drawback, namely their instability in atmosphere. We report on a shelf lifetime study of solar cells based on blends of two widely used polymeric semiconductors with 1-(3-methoxycarbonyl) propyl-1-phenyl[6,6]C61 (PCBM), encapsulated in a new flexible and transparent poly(ethylene naphthalate) (PEN)-based ultra-high barrier material. The barrier coating is entirely fabricated by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). The conjugated polymers used are poly(2-methoxy-5-(3',7'-dimethyloctyloxy)-1,4-phenylene-vinylene) (MDMO-PPV) and poly(3-hexyl)thiophene (P3HT). We have observed in this work that the encapsulation raises the shelf lifetime (50 % of the initial efficiency) from a few hours into the range beyond 3,000 hours for MDMO-PPV based devices. Using the more stable P3HT, the lifetime could be increased to approximately 6,000 hours, or more than eight months.
© (2006) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Christoph Lungenschmied, Gilles Dennler, Grzegorz Czeremuzskin, Mohamed Latrèche, Helmut Neugebauer, and Niyazi Serdar Sariciftci "Flexible encapsulation for organic solar cells", Proc. SPIE 6197, Photonics for Solar Energy Systems, 619712 (12 May 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.662829
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Cited by 15 scholarly publications and 3 patents.
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KEYWORDS
Solar cells

Polymers

Plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition

Coating

Organic photovoltaics

Oxygen

Resistance

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