Eurekalert September 16, 2019
An international team of researchers (China, Sweden) developed a new combination of donor and acceptor materials, with a carefully determined composition, to be used as the active layer in an organic solar cell. The power they produce is low but is probably enough to feed the millions of products IoT products. They designed a non-fullerene acceptor named IO-4Cl and blend it with a polymer donor named PBDB-TF to obtain a photoactive layer whose absorption spectrum matches that of indoor light sources. The photovoltaic characterizations reveal a low energy loss below 0.60 eV. As a result, the organic photovoltaic cell (1 cm2) shows a power conversion efficiency of 26.1% with an open-circuit voltage of 1.10 V under a light-emitting diode illumination of 1,000 lux (2,700 K). The cell shows an excellent stability, maintaining its initial photovoltaic performance under continuous illumination of the indoor light source for 1,000 hours…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
The organic solar cell optimized to convert ambient indoor light to electricity. Credit: Thor Balkhed