Skip to ContentSkip to Navigation
About us Latest news News News articles

Optical and electrical modeling of polymer: fullerene bulk heterojunction solar cells

27 April 2012

PhD ceremony: Mr. J.D. Kotlarski, 16.15 uur, Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Optical and electrical modeling of polymer: fullerene bulk heterojunction solar cells

Promotor(s): prof. P.W.M. Blom

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Because the worldwide demand for usable energy increases yearly, feasible and renewable sources that meet this demand need to be employed. One candidate is the field of photovoltaics, where light absorbed in a semi-conductive material is directly converted to electric current. A relatively new subfield utilizes specially prepared plastic layers in so called organic solar cells to harvest sunlight. Typical organic solar cells have two materials employed in the conversion of photons into extractable charge carriers, often a polymer absorbing photons that are converted into excitons and a fullerene extracting electrons from the polymer’s excitons. In most cases both materials are intermixed as a bulk heterojunction to obtain a larger interfacial area between the materials and have shorter exciton travel distance to that interfacial area. A combined optical and electrical model can be used in order to simulate the electric behavior of organic solar cells containing polymer:fullerene BHJ active layers and their efficiency. In this thesis the principles of optical and electrical modeling are reviewed, the influence of the exciton generation profile on the performance of solar cells with imbalanced charge transport is shown, the importance of balancing charge transport for small band gap solar cells is demonstrated, the influence of the active layer charge transport on structure choice for single and tandem cells is shownand the optimization of single and tandem cells is investigated by varying polymer band gaps and active layer thicknesses.

Last modified:13 March 2020 01.02 a.m.
Share this Facebook LinkedIn
View this page in: Nederlands

More news

  • 01 April 2025

    NSC’s electoral reform plan may have unwanted consequences

    The new voting system, proposed by minister Uitermark, could jeopardize the fundamental principle of proportional representation, says Davide Grossi, Professor of Collective Decision Making and Computation at the University of Groningen

  • 01 April 2025

    ‘AiNed’ National Growth Fund grant for speeding adoption of AI at SMEs

    Professor Ming Cao receives an ‘AiNed’ Growth Fund grant of EUR 2.4 million for research that will contribute to faster adoption of AI at SMEs in the technical industry in the Netherlands.

  • 01 April 2025

    'Diversity leads to better science'

    In addition to her biological research on ageing, Hannah Dugdale also studies disparities relating to diversity in science. Thanks to the latter, she is one of the two 2024 laureates of the Athena Award, an NWO prize for successful and inspiring...