Photovoltaics
Organic solar cells
Organic solar cells are less efficient than inorganic solar cells. But they outperform them when it comes to flexibility, lightness, and cost. Imec develops techniques to increase the efficiency and lifetime of organic solar cells. It also works on an efficient, sustainable manufacturing technology.
Active layers of organic solar cells are typically 100nm to several µm thick. Therefore only small quantities of active material are needed. In addition, the printing technology to deposit these layers allows for extremely high production throughputs. Taken together, this could lower the costs of such cells with a factor 5 to 10 compared to today's solar cell technologies.
One of the most promising concepts in the field of organic solar cells is that of the bulk donor/acceptor heterojunction. Here, the active layer consists of an intimate mixture of two different conjugated organic materials sandwiched between metallic electrodes.
Imec's R&D pursues 2 main routes. The first one looks at polymer-based organic solar cells in which the active layer can be processed from a solution. Typically this is done through spin-coating, and recently we made successful steps towards using printing technology such as screen printing. Secondly, active organic layers using small conjugated molecules can be deposited by vacuum evaporation.