MoO3 thickness, thermal annealing and solvent annealing effects on inverted and direct polymer photovoltaic solar cells

Abstract

Several parameters of the fabrication process of inverted polymer bulk heterojunction solar cells based on titanium oxide as an electron selective layer and molybdenum oxide as a hole selective layer were teste d in order to achieve efficient organic photovoltaic solar cells. Thermal annealing treatment is a common process to achieve optimum morphology, but it proved to be damageable for the performance of this kind of inverted solar cells. We demonstrate using Auger analysis combined with argon etching that diffusion of species occurs from the MoO3/Ag top layers into the active layer upon thermal annealing. In order to achieve efficient devices, the morphology of the bulk heterojunction was then manipulated using the solvent annealing technique as an alternative to thermal annealing. The influence of the MoO3 thickness was studied on inverted, as well as direct, structure. It appeared that only 1 nm-thick MoO3 is enough to exhibit highly efficient devices (PCE = 3.8%) and that increasing the thickness up to 15 nm does not change the device performance. © 2012 by the authors.