Electrophotonic improvement of polymer solar cells by using graphene and plasmonic nanoparticles

It is essential to enhance a solar cell performance at near-infrared region which represents almost 40% of sunlight energy. In this paper, an efficient light trapping polymer solar cell which uses plasmonic nanoparticles and antireflection transparent graphene layer is introduced. The shape of the periodic nanostructure of nanocrystalline zinc oxide (nc-ZnO) grown on its flat surface and the thickness of graphene layer are optimized. Lumerical finite difference time domain (FDTD) solution software is used to design and analyze the proposed structure. In addition, electrical and optical models are developed to calculate the short circuit current density, fill factor and overall efficiency of the designed polymer solar cell structure. The distributed gold nanoparticles (Au-NPs) inside the active layer with 41 Au-NPs/unit cell produce the maximum efficiency and short circuit current density, 8.94% and 17.33 mA/cm(2) respectively, and a high light absorption near-infrared region is obtained. Finally, the electric field distribution inside the solar cell structure is also illustrated in this work.