Nanostructured Bulk-Heterojunction Solar Cells Based on Amorphous Carbon

Journal Article · Thu Mar 16 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · ACS Energy Letters

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00166· OSTI ID:1485485

Risplendi, Francesca ^[1]; Cicero, Giancarlo ^[2]; Grossman, Jeffrey C. ^[1]

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1. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
2. Politecnico di Torino (Italy)

Amorphous carbon (a-C) has the potential to provide properties important to solar photovoltaics that are comparable to those of silicon-based materials with further advantages such as low cost, solution processing, air stability, and higher thermal resistance. We employ accurate computational approaches to explore and understand active layers based on bulk heterojunctions containing a-C. Our results show that interfaces with a-C and other carbon nanostructures could enable successful electron and hole extraction as well as reduced sources for carrier recombination. Ab initio molecular dynamics and density functional theory calculations are carried out for a large statistical set of interfaces between a-C structures of different densities and either carbon nanotubes or fullerenes. Here, we show that the energy alignment at such interfaces can be widely tuned as a function of a-C density, doping chemistry, or nanostructure size to obtain type-II heterostructures and that the optical properties of such interfaces would be highly favorable for sunlight harvesting.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• OSTI ID: 1485485
• Journal Information: ACS Energy Letters, Journal Name: ACS Energy Letters Journal Issue: 4 Vol. 2; ISSN 2380-8195
• Publisher: American Chemical Society (ACS)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

14 SOLAR ENERGY