Organic polymer solar cells

Organic solar cells and polymer solar cells are built from thin films (typically 100 nm) of organic semiconductors such as polymers and small-molecule compounds like polyphenylene vinylene, copper phthalocyanine (a blue or green organic pigment) and carbon fullerenes and fullerene derivatives such as
PCBM. Energy conversion efficiencies achieved to date using conductive polymers are low compared to inorganic materials.

However, it improved quickly in the last few years and the highest NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) certified efficiency has reached 6.77%. In addition, these cells could be beneficial for some applications where mechanical flexibility and disposability are important.

These devices differ from inorganic semiconductor solar cells in that they do not rely on the large built-in electric field of a PN junction to separate the electrons and holes created when photons are absorbed. The active region of an organic device consists of two materials, one which acts as an electron donor and the other as an acceptor. When a photon is converted into an electron hole pair, typically in the donor material, the charges tend to remain bound in the form of an exciton, and are separated when the exciton diffuses to the donor-acceptor interface. The short exciton diffusion lengths of most polymer systems tend to limit the efficiency of such devices. Nanostructured interfaces, sometimes in the form of bulk heterojunctions, can improve performance