Abstract
Polymer electronics has the power of revolutionizing the world of printable flexible electronics through reducing the production costs of large-scale nanoelectronic applications. However, performance and stability of such devices are still generally low compared to their inorganic counterparts, rendering the development of novel multiscale experimental-and theoretical-investigation techniques ...
Abstract
Polymer electronics has the power of revolutionizing the world of printable flexible electronics through reducing the production costs of large-scale nanoelectronic applications. However, performance and stability of such devices are still generally low compared to their inorganic counterparts, rendering the development of novel multiscale experimental-and theoretical-investigation techniques necessary, to increase the understanding of the causes for performance losses under operation conditions. To this end, we introduce in this paper a novel parametrized field-based multiscale algorithm, which permits to study effects of chemical details, like e.g. inter-mixing of the donor-and acceptor-components and/or photodegradation, on the photovoltaic performance of polymer-based solar-cell nanodevices with sizes of technological relevance. By comparing its results with the ones of atomistic particle-based solar-cell calculations, we demonstrate that the parametrized field-based approach provides a reasonable value for the internal quantum efficiency of a polyfluorene-based blend heterojunction, used for parametrization of the exciton dissociation and charge transfer rates. Moreover, we show that its combination with a modified version of the transfer-matrix method allows the inclusion of the influence of the optical absorption of the individual device components, like e.g. the electrodes and/or nanophases from the photoactive layer, into the algorithm. This full-device solar-cell approach enables us to determine values for the external quantum efficiency of several polymer blend morphologies in good agreement with experimental measurements. Finally, the latter study also reveals, in concordance with experimental observations, that reducing charge-carrier losses is more important than reducing exciton- and photon-losses for optimizing the performance of solar-cell devices. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Altmetric