In recent years alternative renewable energies including that obtained by solar cells have attracted much attention due to exhaustion of other conventional energy resources especially fossil-based fuels. Photovoltaic energy is one of the cleanest, most applicable and promising alternative energy using limitless sun light as raw material. Even though, inorganic solar cells dominate in the world ...

Hybrid silicon/polymer solar cells promise to be an economically feasible alternative energy solution for various applications if ultrathin flexible crystalline silicon (c-Si) substrates are used. However, utilization of ultrathin c-Si encounters problems in light harvesting and electronic losses at surfaces, which severely degrade the performance of solar cells. Here, we developed a metal-assi...

(2014). Enhanced efficiency of solution-processed small-molecule solar cells upon incorporation of gold nanospheres and nanorods into organic layers.

Wurtzite structures, such as ZnO, GaN, InN and CdS, are piezoelectric semiconductor materials. A piezopotential is formed in the crystal by the piezoelectric charges created by applying a stress. The inner-crystal piezopotential can effectively tune/control the carrier separations and transport processes at the vicinity of a p–n junction or metal–semiconductor contact, which is called the piezo...

Introduction CdSe-P3HT (poly(3-hexylthiophene))) nanocomposites are studied for their application in hybrid solar cells. Semiconductor inorganic/organic hybrid solar cells offer many advantages relative to their non-hybrid counterparts. They have the advantages of conjugated polymers such as light weight, flexibility, abundance of resources, the potential for roll-to-roll and non-vacuum process...

In the last decade, photovoltaics (PV) has experienced an important transformation. Traditional solar cells formed by compact semiconductor layers have been joined by new kinds of cells that are constituted by a complex mixture of organic, inorganic and solid or liquid electrolyte materials, and rely on charge separation at the nanoscale. Recently, metal organic halide perovskites have appeared...

Though environmental improvement has been claimed for the application of nanotechnology to solar cells, several characteristics of the fullerene-based organic, and the dye-sensitized nanoparticulate, solar cell are not conducive to such improvement. These include relatively high energy and materials inputs in the production of nanoparticles, a relatively low solar radiation to electricity conve...

The accumulation of dissociated charge carriers plays an important role in reducing the loss occurring in organic solar cells. We find from light-assisted capacitance measurements that the charge accumulation inevitably occurred at the electrode and photovoltaic layer interface for bulk-heterojunction ITO/PEDOT:PSS/P3HT:PCBM/Ca/Al solar cells. Our results indicate, for the first time through im...

Silicon nanocrystal (Si-nc) down-conversion is demonstrated to enhance organic and hybrid organic/inorganic bulk heterojunction solar cells based on PTB7:[70]PCBM bulk heterojunction devices. Surfactant free surface-engineered Si-ncs can be integrated into the device architecture to be optically active and provide a means of effective down-conversion of blue photons (high energy photons below ∼...