Large area flexible polymer solar cells with high efficiency enabled by imprinted Ag grid and modified buffer layer

To take a full advantage of polymer semiconductors on realization of large-area flexible photovoltaic devices, herein, we fabricate polymer solar cells on the basis of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) with imprinted Ag grid as transparent electrode. The key fabrication procedure is the adoption of a modified PEDOT:PSS (PH1000) solution for spin-coating the buffer layer to form a compact contact with the substrate. In comparison with the devices with intrinsic PEDOT:PSS buffer layer, the advanced devices present a much higher efficiency of 6.51%, even in a large device area of 2.25 cm(2). Subsequent characterizations reveal that such devices show an impressive performance stability as the bending angle is enlarged to 180 degrees and bending time is up to 1000 cycles. Not only providing a general methodology to construct high efficient and flexible polymer solar cells, this paper also involves deep insights on device working mechanism in bending conditions. (C) 2017 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.