Design of a block copolymer solar cell

A photovoltaic device based on conjugated block copolymers has been designed and preliminarily examined by the recent development of target block copolymers. The unique feature of the device includes a bridge donor-bridge-acceptor-type of block copolymer primary structure, where donor and acceptor are conjugated polymer blocks and bridge is a non-conjugated and flexible chain, a pi orbital stacked and conjugated chain self-assembled and ordered secondary structure, and a donor/acceptor asymmetric layers sandwiched donor/ acceptor columnar tertiary structure. This device is expected to improve the photovoltaic power conversion efficiency significantly in comparison to most existing organic-based donor/ acceptor binary photovoltaic devices due to the reduction of exciton loss, the carrier loss, as well as the photon loss via three-dimensional space and energy level optimizations. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.