Fabrication of polymer/cadmium sulfide hybrid solar cells [P3HT:CdS and PCPDTBT:CdS] by spray deposition

Neetesh Kumar; Viresh Dutta

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2014.07.047

Fabrication of polymer/cadmium sulfide hybrid solar cells [P3HT:CdS and PCPDTBT:CdS] by spray deposition

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2014 Nov 15:434:181-7. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2014.07.047. Epub 2014 Aug 14.

Authors

Neetesh Kumar¹, Viresh Dutta²

Affiliations

¹ Photovoltaic Laboratory, Centre for Energy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, India. Electronic address: neetesh16@gmail.com.
² Photovoltaic Laboratory, Centre for Energy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, India. Electronic address: v.dutta@ces.iitd.ac.in.

PMID: 25203909
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2014.07.047

Abstract

This paper investigates fabrication of surfactant free CdS nanoparticles (NPs) and application in the fabrication of P3HT:CdS and PCPDTBT:CdS bulk-heterojunction hybrid solar cells using high-throughput, large-area, low cost spray deposition technique. Both the hybrid active layers and hole transport layers are deposited by spray technique. The CdS/Poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl) (P3HT) and CdS/Poly[2,6-(4,4-bis-(2-ethylhexyl)-4H-cyclopenta[2,1-b;3,4-b']dithiophene)-alt-4,7(2,1,3-benzothiadiazole)] (PCPDTBT) hybrid devices are fabricated by spray deposition process at optimized conditions (i.e. film thickness, spray solution volume, distance between sample and spray nozzle, substrate temperature, etc.). The power conversion efficiency of η=0.6% and 1.02% is obtained for P3HT:CdS and PCPDTBT:CdS hybrid devices, respectively. Spray coating holds significant promise as a technique capable of fabricating large-area, high performance hybrid solar cells.

Keywords: Hybrid solar cells; Photoluminescence quenching; Spray deposition; Spray pyrolysis; Surfactant free nanoparticles.