Journal
JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY A
Volume 1, Issue 19, Pages 6004-6009Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c3ta10987a
Keywords
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Funding
- Cluster of Excellence Engineering of Advanced Materials at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
- German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of its Excellence Initiative
- Solar Factory of the Future within the framework of the Energy Campus Nuremberg (EnCN)
- German Research Foundation (DFG) [BR 4031/1-1, BR 4031/1-2]
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Intrinsic zinc oxide (ZnO) is widely used as an electron extraction layer (EEL) for inverted polymer solar cells. Despite the excellent device performance, a major drawback for large area production is its low conductivity. Using microscopic simulations, we derived a technically reasonable threshold value of 10(-3) S cm(-1) for the conductivity required to overcome transport limitations. For conductivity values typical for ZnO we observed the interface layer thickness restriction at only a few tens of nanometers, either as a fill factor drop due to serial resistance, eventually accompanied by a second diode behavior, or by the need for light soaking. Higher conductive aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO), which was introduced earlier, meets the desired conductivity threshold, however, at the cost of high temperature processing. High annealing temperatures (>150 degrees C) significantly improve the electrical properties of ZnO, but prohibit processing on plastic substrates or organic active layers. Here we report on AZO layers from a sol-gel precursor, which has been already reported to give sufficiently high conductivities at lower processing temperatures (<150 degrees C). We investigate the influence of different precursor compositions on the electrical properties of the thin films and their performance in inverted poly(3-hexylthiophene):[6,6]-phenyl-C-61-butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT:PCBM) solar cells. Low temperature AZO layers with thicknesses up to 680 nm maintained comparable performance to devices with thin AZO layers.
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