Organic Solar Cells: A Technological Review

Abstract

In today’s technologically advanced era, our society needs an eco-friendly technology that is efficient and at the same time has low manufacturing cost. Solar energy is one of the major sources of renewable energy entering the earth’s atmosphere in bulk. It is a fact that the amount of solar energy lighting up the earth’s land mass over a year is around 3000 times the total amount of annual human energy use. Fossil fuels are very limited and we would not be able to use it in upcoming future. Among many materials used for fabrication of solar cells in the current and past century, the organic solar cells are good solution to low cost energy production. So, new photovoltaic energy conversion technology can contribute to environment friendly renewable energy production and reduction of CO₂ emission associated with fossil fuel and biomass. Organic photovoltaic solar cells deal with conductive polymer or small organic molecules. This type of solar cell has attracted attention of the photovoltaic industry in past few years because of its flexibility in usage, low manufacturing cost and abundance in material than first and second-generation photovoltaic technology. Many researchers have investigated on the various materials of the organic solar cells. In 1986, when first organic solar cell was fabricated, it had the efficiency of 1.1%. Now the laboratory efficiency of solar cell has been reported of the order of 11%. This paper reviews the technological progress of organic solar cells as a cheap and eco-friendly conversion of solar energy to electricity.

Keywords: Photovoltaic energy conversion, organic solar cell, solar cell fabrication materials

Cite this Article

Farheen Naaz, Usha Bajpai. Organic Solar Cells: A Technological Review. Journal of Alternate Energy Sources and Technologies. 2017; 8(1): 18–22p.