RIS ID

104532

Publication Details

Cheng, Y. Yap., Nattestad, A., Schulze, T. F., MacQueen, R. W., Fückel, B., Lips, K., Wallace, G. G., Khoury, T., Crossley, M. J. & Schmidt, T. W. (2015). Increased upconversion performance for thin film solar cells: A trimolecular composition. Chemical Science, 7 (1), 559-568.

Abstract

Photochemical upconversion based on triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA-UC) is employed to enhance the short-circuit currents generated by two varieties of thin-film solar cells, a hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cell and a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC). TTA-UC is exploited to harvest transmitted sub-bandgap photons, combine their energies and re-radiate upconverted photons back towards the solar cells. In the present study we employ a dual-emitter TTA-UC system which allows for significantly improved UC quantum yields as compared to the previously used single-emitter TTA systems. In doing so we achieve record photo-current enhancement values for both the a-Si:H device and the DSC, surpassing 10-3 mA cm-2 sun-2 for the first time for a TTA-UC system and marking a record for upconversion-enhanced solar cells in general. We discuss pertinent challenges of the TTA-UC technology which need to be addressed in order to achieve its viable device application.

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c5sc03215f