Flexible Organic Solar Cells Including Efficiency Enhancing Grating Structures

In this work, a new method for the fabrication of organic solar cells containing functional light-trapping nanostructures on flexible substrates is presented. Polyimide is spin-coated on silicon support substrates, enabling standard micro- and nanotechnology fabrication techniques, such as photolithography and electron-beam lithography, besides the steps required for the bulk-heterojunction organic solar cell fabrication. After the production steps, the solar cells on polyimide are peeled off the silicon support substrates, resulting in flexible devices containing nanostructures for light absorption enhancement. Since the solar cells avoid using brittle electrodes, the performance of the flexible devices is not affected by the peeling process. We have investigated three different nanostructured grating designs and conclude that gratings with a 500 nm pitch distance have the highest light-trapping efficiency for the selected active layer material (P3HT:PCBM), resulting in an enhancement of about 34% on the solar cell efficiency. The presented method can be applied to a large variety of flexible nanostructured devices in future applications.