Search

Fair and meaningful device per- formance comparison among luminescent solar concentrator- photovoltaic (LSC-PV) reports cannot be realized without a gen- eral consensus on reporting stan- dards in LSC-PV research. There- fore, it is imperative to adopt standardized characterization protocols for these emerging types of PV devices that are consistent with other PV devices. This commentary highlights several common limitations in LSC literature and summarizes the best practices moving for- ward to harmonize with standard PV reporting, considering the greater nuances present with LSC-PV. Based on these prac- tices, a checklist of actionable items is provided to help stan- dardize the characterization/re- porting protocols and offer a set of baseline expectations for au- thors, reviewers, and editors. The general consensus combined with the checklist will ultimately guide LSC-PV research towards reliable and meaningful ad- vances.

Chenchen Yang joined the materials science program at Michigan State University in 2015 to work under Prof. Lunt in the Molecular and Organic Excitonics Lab. He earned his B.E. from the University of Electronic Science and Engineering of China in 2012. Then, he obtained his M.S. from University of Florida in 2015. His current research focuses on transparent solar cell synthesis, fabrication, and characterization. Dianyi Liu obtained his PhD in inorganic chemistry from Lanzhou University in 2009. He then worked as a postdoc at Peking University, the University of Saskatchewan, and Michigan State University. He began as an assistant professor at Westlake University in January 2019. His research interests include flexible electronics, optoelectronic materials, and devices. Matthew Bates is a graduate student in chemical engineering at Michigan State University working in the Molecular and Organic Excitonic Lab led by Prof. Lunt. He received his B.S. in chemical engineering from Oregon State University in 2016. He is focused on developing transparent photovoltaics. Miles Barr is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Ubiquitous Energy in Redwood City, CA. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in chemical engineering. He then co-founded Ubiquitous Energy and has grown the company through pilot manufacturing, serving as both CEO and CTO. His team is currently working to develop, scale up, and commercialize transparent solar technology for a variety of end applications. Richard R. Lunt is the Johansen Crosby Endowed Professor at Michigan State University in the Departments of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science and Physics. He earned his B.S. from the University of Delaware and his PhD from Princeton University. He then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at MIT. His group focuses on understanding and exploiting excitonic photophysics and molecular crystal growth to develop unique thin-film optoelectronic devices. He is known for his pioneering work on transparent solar cells.

Solar energy offers a viable solution to our growing energy need. While adoption of conventional photovoltaics on rooftops and in solar farms has grown rapidly in the last decade, there is still plenty of opportunity for expansion. See-through solar technologies with partial light transmission developed over the past 30 years have initiated methods of integration not possible with conventional modules. The large-scale deployment necessary to offset global energy consumption could be further accelerated by developing fully invisible solar cells that selectively absorb ultraviolet and near-infrared light, allowing many of the surfaces of our built environment to be turned into solar harvesting arrays without impacting the function or aesthetics. Here, we review recent advances in photovoltaics with varying degrees of visible light transparency. We discuss the figures of merit necessary to characterize transparent photovoltaics, and outline the requirements to enable their widespread adoption in buildings, windows, electronic device displays, and automobiles. Transparency offers integration routes unavailable to opaque photovoltaics. Here, Lunt and co-workers review recent progress in transparent solar technologies, highlight technical challenges and measurement considerations, and review performance requirements for various applications.

Organic photovoltaics devices typically utilize illumination through a transparent substrate, such as glass or an optically clear plastic. Utilization of opaque substrates, including low cost foils, papers, and textiles, requires architectures that instead allow illumination through the top of the device. Here, we demonstrate top-illuminated organic photovoltaics, employing a dry vapor-printed poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) polymer anode deposited by oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD) on top of a small-molecule organic heterojunction based on vacuum-evaporated tetraphenyldibenzoperiflanthene (DBP) and C60 heterojunctions. Application of a molybdenum trioxide (MoO3) buffer layer prior to oCVD deposition increases the device photocurrent nearly 10 times by preventing oxidation of the underlying photoactive DBP electron donor layer during the oCVD PEDOT deposition, and resulting in power conversion efficiencies of up to 2.8% for the top-illuminated, ITO-free devices, approximately 75% that of the conventional cell architecture with indium-tin oxide (ITO) transparent anode (3.7%). Finally, we demonstrate the broad applicability of this architecture by fabricating devices on a variety of opaque surfaces, including common paper products with over 2.0% power conversion efficiency, the highest to date on such fiber-based substrates.

For the successful integration of graphene as a transparent conducting electrode in organic solar cells, proper energy level alignment at the interface between the graphene and the adjacent organic layer is critical. The role of a hole transporting layer (HTL) thus becomes more significant due to the generally lower work function of graphene compared to ITO. A commonly used HTL material with ITO anodes is poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) with poly(styrenesulfonate) (PSS) as the solid-state dopant. However, graphene's hydrophobic surface renders uniform coverage of PEDOT:PSS (aqueous solution) by spin-casting very challenging. Here, we introduce a novel, yet simple, vapor printing method for creating patterned HTL PEDOT layers directly onto the graphene surface. Vapor printing represents the implementation of shadow masking in combination with oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD). The oCVD method was developed for the formation of blanket (i.e., unpatterened) layers of pure PEDOT (i.e., no PSS) with systematically variable work function. In the unmasked regions, vapor printing produces complete, uniform, smooth layers of pure PEDOT over graphene. Graphene electrodes were synthesized under low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) using a copper catalyst. The use of another electron donor material, tetraphenyldibenzoperiflanthene, instead of copper phthalocyanine in the organic solar cells also improves the power conversion efficiency. With the vapor printed HTL, the devices using graphene electrodes yield comparable performances to the ITO reference devices (η(p,LPCVD) = 3.01%, and η(p,ITO) = 3.20%).

We demonstrate the use of a vacuum-based, vapor phase technique for the deposition of a donor polymer for use in polymer solar cells. Unsubstituted polythiophene (PT), which is insoluble and infusible and thus typically difficult to process, is easily prepared by oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD). The oCVD process results in a conductive PT film that is heavily doped with FeCl 3 , which is used as the oxidizing agent. A post-deposition methanol rinse sufficiently dedopes the film and removes spent oxidant, leaving semiconducting PT with an optical bandgap close to 2 eV. Drastic changes in the film color, absorption spectra, and film composition confirm the dedoping process. The resulting semiconducting PT is then applied as an electron donor in bilayer heterojunction solar cells with a thermally evaporated C 60 electron acceptor layer, resulting in power conversion efficiencies up to 0.8%. The absorption edge of the PT at ∼620 nm closely matches the edge present in the external quantum efficiency spectra, indicating that the oCVD PT contributes to the photocurrent of the devices. This demonstrates that the oCVD technique can be used in the processing and design of polymer active layers for polymer solar cells and hybrid small molecular organic solar cells without solubility, temperature, or substrate considerations.

Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) methods significantly augment the capabilities of traditional surface modification techniques for designing polymeric surfaces. In CVD polymerization, the monomer(s) are delivered to the surface through the vapor phase and then undergo simultaneous polymerization and thin film formation. By eliminating the need to dissolve macromolecules, CVD enables insoluble polymers to be coated and prevents solvent damage to the substrate. Since de-wetting and surface tension effects are absent, CVD coatings conform to the geometry of the underlying substrate. Hence, CVD polymers can be readily applied to virtually any substrate: organic, inorganic, rigid, flexible, planar, three-dimensional, dense, or porous. CVD methods integrate readily with other vacuum processes used to fabricate patterned surfaces and devices. CVD film growth proceeds from the substrate up, allowing for interfacial engineering, real-time monitoring, thickness control, and the synthesis of films with graded composition. This article focuses on two CVD polymerization methods that closely translate solution chemistry to vapor deposition; initiated CVD and oxidative CVD. The basic concepts underlying these methods and the resultant advantages over other thin film coating techniques are described, along with selected applications where CVD polymers are an enabling technology., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (Contract DAAD-19-02-D-0002)

In the version of this Review originally published, the Fig. 7a y-axis unit was incorrectly given as ‘mW cm2’; it should have read ‘mW cm–2’. This has now been corrected in all versions of the Review.

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) polymerization utilizes the delivery of vapor-phase monomers to form chemically well-defined polymeric films directly on the surface of a substrate. CVD polymers are desirable as conformal surface modification layers exhibiting strong retention of organic functional groups, and, in some cases, are responsive to external stimuli. Traditional wet-chemical chain- and step-growth mechanisms guide the development of new heterogeneous CVD polymerization techniques. Commonality with inorganic CVD methods facilitates the fabrication of hybrid devices. CVD polymers bridge microfabrication technology with chemical, biological, and nanoparticle systems and assembly. Robust interfaces can be achieved through covalent grafting enabling high-resolution (60 nm) patterning, even on flexible substrates. Utilizing only low-energy input to drive selective chemistry, modest vacuum, and room-temperature substrates, CVD polymerization is compatible with thermally sensitive substrates, such as paper, textiles, and plastics. CVD methods are particularly valuable for insoluble and infusible films, including fluoropolymers, electrically conductive polymers, and controllably crosslinked networks and for the potential to reduce environmental, health, and safety impacts associated with solvents. Quantitative models aid the development of large-area and roll-to-roll CVD polymer reactors. Relevant background, fundamental principles, and selected applications are reviewed.

We demonstrate series-integrated multijunction organic photovoltaics fabricated monolithically by vapor-deposition in a transposed subcell order with the near-infrared-absorbing subcell in front of the green-absorbing subcell. This transposed subcell order is enabled by the highly complementary absorption spectra of a near-infrared-absorbing visibly-transparent subcell and a visible-absorbing subcell and motivated by the non-spatially-uniform optical intensity in nanoscale photovoltaics. The subcell order and thicknesses are optimized via transfer-matrix formalism and short-circuit current simulations. An efficient charge recombination zone consisting of layers of BCP/Ag/MoOx leads to negligible voltage and series-resistance losses. Under 1-sun illumination the multijunction solar cells exhibit a power conversion efficiency of 5.5 ± 0.2% with an FF of 0.685 ± 0.002 and a V(OC) of 1.65 ± 0.02 V, corresponding to the sum of the V(OC) of the component subcells. These devices exhibit a broad spectral response (in the wavelength range of 350 nm to 850 nm) but are limited by subcell external quantum efficiencies between 20% and 30% over the photoactive spectrum.

We demonstrate efficient zinc sulfide cathode window layers in thin-film organic photovoltaics enabled by n-type doping zinc sulfide (ZnS) with aluminum sulfide (Al2S3) directly through co-deposition. By optimizing the Al2S3 concentration, the power conversion efficiency is improved from 0.6% ± 0.2% in undoped ZnS window layer devices to 1.8% ± 0.1%, identical to control devices. The mechanism for this performance enhancement is shown to stem from the enhanced conductivity and interface energetics of ZnS upon n-type doping. This work expands the catalog of efficient, inorganic, non-toxic, cathode side window layers that could be effective in a range of thin-film photovoltaic technologies.

Integration of transparent photovoltaics into the building envelope creates unique opportunities to reduce the levelized electricity cost of solar power. However, this integration warrants consideration of the angular dependence of these devices as illumination around the building envelope is rarely at normal incidence. Here we correctly update transfer-matrix and equations to accurately model the quantum efficiency and optical properties under oblique illumination. We use this model to demonstrate the various angular performance characteristics possible for proof-of-concept optimizations of transparent planar-heterojunction solar cells and discuss considerations needed to fully account for optical, electrical, and positional configurations in this optimization.

Vacuum and solution processed versions of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) are used as cathode interlayers in inverted organic photovoltaic cells comprising tetraphenyldibenzoperiflanthene as the electron donor and C60 as the electron acceptor. Chemical treatment of the as-deposited PEDOT layers with tetrakis(dimethylamino)ethylene or cesium carbonate reduces the work function by up to 0.8 eV. Inserting these PEDOT layers at the indium tin oxide cathode results in improved electron collection and efficiencies of up to 2.3 ± 0.2%, approaching the 3.2 ± 0.3% of the conventional device. This illustrates the potential for efficient polymer cathode materials and inverted device architectures compatible with either solution or vacuum processing.

We present a simple one-step process to simultaneously create patterned and amine functionalized biocompatible conducting polymer nanostructures, using grafting reactions between oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD) PEDOT conducting polymers and amine functionalized polystyrene (PS) colloidal templates. The functionality of the colloidal template is directly transferred to the surface of the grafted PEDOT, which is patterned as nanobowls, while preserving the advantageous electrical properties of the bulk conducting polymer. This surface functionality affords the ability to couple bioactive molecules or sensing elements for various applications, which we demonstrate by immobilizing fluorescent ligands onto the PEDOT nanopatterns. Nanoscale substructure is introduced into the patterned oCVD layer by replacing the FeCl3 oxidizing agent with CuCl2.