Year
2017
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
School of Chemistry
Abstract
Semiconducting polymer-based solar cells (PSCs) have attracted great interest due to its potential for manufacturing at low cost and large quantity. While the performance of PSCs has significantly improved in the past twenty years, the state-of-the-art efficiency around 12 % is still much lower than the theoretical efficiency limit, which is above 31%. One of the major bottlenecks to PSC efficiency is bimolecular recombination, which limits the active layer thickness and thus sunlight harvesting of the solar cell. Reduced bimolecular recombination, in which the bimolecular recombination rate is one to three orders of magnitude lower than predicted by a model based on Langevin theory, has been shown to have beneficial effects most notably allowing large fill factors at large active layer thicknesses. Reduced recombination has been observed only in a few confirmed cases of conjugated polymer / fullerene blends. Initially, this study was motivated to find additional examples of material systems with reduced recombination in order to establish general design guides for new high-performance materials.
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Guanran, The influence of dielectric screening on bimolecular recombination in binary and ternary organic solar cells, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of Chemistry, University of Wollongong, 2017. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses1/307
FoR codes (2008)
0303 MACROMOLECULAR AND MATERIALS CHEMISTRY, 0306 PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY (INCL. STRUCTURAL)
Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.