Issue 6, 2010
From the journal:

Journal of Materials Chemistry

Elucidating the factors that determine the open circuit voltage in discrete heterojunction organic photovoltaic cells

Virendra Chauhan,a   Ross Hatton,*a   Paul Sullivan,a   Tim Jones,*a   Sang Wan Cho,b   Louis Piper,b   Alex deMasib  and  Kevin Smithb  

* Corresponding authors

a Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
E-mail: t.s.jones@warwick.ac.uk, Ross.Hatton@warwick.ac.uk
Fax: +44 (0) 2476 58265
Tel: +44 (0) 2476 52865

b Department of Physics, Boston University, 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, USA
E-mail: ksmith@bu.edu
Fax: +1 617 353 9393
Tel: +1 617 353 6117

Abstract

The operation of discrete heterojunction organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells employing chloro-aluminium phthalocyanine (ClAlPc) as the electron donor and C60 as the electron acceptor is reported and the characteristics are correlated with the energy level structure of the devices determined using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The results give new insight into the origin of the open circuit voltage (Voc) in discrete heterojunction OPVs. The measured Voc in this system is found to be determined by: (i) the frontier orbital energy offsets between the donor and acceptor materials, accounting for the likely formation of an abrupt vacuum level shift at the heterojunction interface and (ii) the degree of alignment between the hole-extracting electrode Fermi level and the highest occupied molecular orbital energy of the electron donor material. The generality of the findings is demonstrated by rationalising the Voc in OPVs employing the archetypal electron donor, copper phthalocyanine.

Graphical abstract: Elucidating the factors that determine the open circuit voltage in discrete heterojunction organic photovoltaic cells

About
Cited by
Related
Download options Please wait...

Article information

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1039/B919723K
Article type
Paper
Submitted
22 Sep 2009
Accepted
25 Nov 2009
First published
16 Dec 2009

J. Mater. Chem., 2010,20, 1173-1178

Permissions

Request permissions

Elucidating the factors that determine the open circuit voltage in discrete heterojunction organic photovoltaic cells

V. Chauhan, R. Hatton, P. Sullivan, T. Jones, S. W. Cho, L. Piper, A. deMasi and K. Smith, J. Mater. Chem., 2010, 20, 1173 DOI: 10.1039/B919723K

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Spotlight

Advertisements