Design and synthesis of novel materials for optimization of the active layer morphology and stability of bulk heterojunction organic photovoltaics

Abstract

Due to the tremendous amount of research performed during the last decade, the performance of organic solar cells has strongly been improved and power conversion efficiencies (PCE’s) over 10% are currently reported for single junction polymer-based solar cells. However, for organic photovoltaics (OPV) to evolve into an economically viable technology, three major requirements need to be fulfilled, i.e. a high efficiency, a sufficiently long lifetime and the possibility to produce the solar cells at low cost. In this PhD thesis, work was performed on two of these parameters, performance and stability, through the development of new low bandgap copolymers and small molecule analogues and evaluation of their solar cell characteristics.