Investigation of improvement in stability and power conversion efficiency of organic solar cells fabricated by incorporating carbon nanostructures in device architecture

Abstract Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) along with reduced graphene oxide (RGO) are synthesized using modest methods and their composites with the polymers PEDOT:PSS and P3HT are prepared using an easy solution method. An attractive improvement in the composites’ physical properties with wt% increase of the filler material is observed, encouraging their applications in the fabrication of organic solar cells (OSCs). Using the composites in appropriate layers of the device architecture, OSCs have been fabricated by spin coating, and the incorporation of filler CNTs and RGO has been observed to result in considerable improvement in the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of all OSCs. To study the stability of the devices, the electrical properties of the OSCs have been periodically investigated in two different environments to understand the impact of both intrinsic and extrinsic degradation. The incorporation of filler carbon nanomaterials has been noticed to be successful in significantly prolonging the stability of the OSCs while maintaining the augmentation in PCE. For the best performing devices, the incorporation of CNTs and RGO has enhanced the PCE by 12.52% and 13.21% and improved the device lifetime by 37.31% and 43.23%, respectively, compared to the reference device. The results discussed in this report are greatly promising for the large scale consideration of a pioneering role of organic materials in numerous optoelectronic devices from a new and innovative perception assisted by the application of carbon-based nanomaterials.