Advances in Organic Photovoltaics

Abstract

Organic solar cells (OSCs), based on organic semiconductor materials as photoactive layers, have attracted broad interest as a promising next-generation photovoltaic technology, since they can be fabricated into low-cost, colorful, semitransparent, flexible, and large-area devices through printing process. In the past decades, enormous efforts have been dedicated to improving power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of OSCs, such as designing high-performance photovoltaic materials, optimizing device interfacial layers, controlling active layer morphology, developing new device architectures, and elucidating device working mechanism. Nowadays, the PCEs of small-area OSCs have exceeded 18%. In addition, in order to realize commercialization of OSCs, considerable progress has been made in manufacturing large-area OSCs, reducing cost, improving lifetime, and exploring potential applications in building integrated photovoltaics and indoor photovoltaics. Chinese researchers have made pioneering and leading contributions in this field. In this review, first, we briefly introduce basic knowledge of OSCs; then, summarize important recent research progress in terms of molecular engineering, device engineering, device physics and application exploration; finally, analyze challenges and future prospects of this field.