Herbicide added to organic solar cells to boost efficiency

Organic materials present an alternative to inorganic materials such as silicon because as they are light, flexible and relatively inexpensive to make, even offering the possibility for printable manufacture.

KAUST team roll on with solar perovskite production

For organic photovoltaics to become a realistic replacement for fossil fuels, they must improve their efficiency when converting the fraction of incident solar energy to electrical energy and key to achieving this is choosing the right combination of materials.

PhD student Yuanbao Lin and Thomas Anthopoulos have now achieved this by developing what Lin describes as "an efficient molecular dopant to improve the performance and stability of organic solar cells." The team’s findings are published in ACS Energy Letters.

Most photovoltaic devices have an n-type region and a p-region, so-called because each region has a net negative and positive electric charge. These charges can be achieved by adding impurities to the semiconductor. An impurity that creates an n-type material is a donor, while an acceptor impurity makes a p-type material.