Plasmonics-enhanced organic solar cells with complex metallic nanoparticles

Organic semiconducting polymers, due to their tunable optical and electronic properties and ease of fabrication processes, are useful in numerous photonic applications. They have found increased interest in the field of photovoltaics due to their comparative low cost as compared to current commercial silicon solar cell modules. The introduction of plasmonic effects in these organic polymer-based solar cells leads to better performance characteristics of these cells. The plasmonic nanoparticles, which can be placed in the different layers of the organic solar cell (OSC), scatter light into the active layer thereby increasing the optical path length of the incident light leading to higher absorption and short circuit current density of the OSC. In this paper, an organic solar cell based on a low bandgap polymer blend and containing complex plasmonic metal nanoparticles has been presented. Finite difference time domain (FDTD) method has been used to simulate models to study the interaction of incident light with the OSCs containing the plasmonic nanoparticles and then compare their performance with that of the OSCs without the nanoparticles. The effect of varying nanoparticle and solar cell parameters on the absorption enhancement of the OSC was studied to determine the best configuration for fabrication. Short circuit current density enhancement of 19.3% was obtained in the OSC containing the nanoparticles. The plasmonic nanoparticles, thus obtained, were synthesized by chemical processing to be introduced in OSCs with different active layer materials for high power conversion efficiency.