Solar cells are one attractive method for harnessing inexhaustible clean energy from the sun. Organic photovoltaic technology is emerging as a potential competitor to silicon-based photovoltaic cells (PVCs), and their power conversion efficiencies (PCE) can now exceed 6%. Polymeric bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) PVCs, whose photoactive layer is composed of a blend of bicontinuous and interpenetratin...

Domain-like ultra-thin layers deposited electrochemically on an ITO electrode from perylene bisimide derivatives are found to improve the electron collection effectively in inverted photovoltaic cells.

Photovoltaic converters are important converters for the application of renewable energy sources because of the direct conversion of solar energy to electric energy. They have some advantages such as low weight and feasibility of small scales, but they are more expensive compared to other types of energy converters. Therefore, it is important to absorb the maximum solar energy in order to incre...

Improving the efficiency of organic solar cells (OSCs), which are far less efficient than inorganic semiconductor solar cells, is of paramount importance to the field of polymer photovoltaics. Current state-of-the-art bulk heterojunction (BHJ) OSCs utilize a homogeneous blend of the semiconducting polymer poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and the fullerene derivative [6,6]-phenyl C61butyric acid me...

A hybrid system is described that combines the features of two solar technologies – photo-voltaic conversion to electricity (PV) and thermal conversion to heat and finally to electric energy for battery usage. Under the condition of the same output power of photovoltaic system, using low cost superiority of the high concentrator material in place of the expensive solar cell to reduce the compre...

Squaraine dyes are considered an important group of photoactive materials in the field of organic photovoltaic devices. In this work, we purposely tuned the side chains and number of hydroxyl (OH) groups in a series of squaraine (SQ) dyes, i.e., SQ1−4, to investigate the effect of structural variations on the material properties as well as the performance of these dyes as donor materials in bul...

Semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have a potential to increase the power conversion efficiency in photovoltaic operation because of the enhancement of photoexcitation. Recent advances in self-assembled QD solar cells (QDSCs) and colloidal QDSCs are reviewed, with a focus on understanding carrier dynamics. For intermediate-band solar cells using selfassembled QDs, suppression of a reduction of op...