Record efficiency in organic solar cells

Organic photovoltaic cells (or cells) are a promising and cheap next-generation solar energy technology for clean energy, especially useful in portable or wearable devices.

However, the energy conversion has been suffering losses due to the recombination of photogenerated charge carriers, and due to this, these solar cells have experienced significant difficulties in improving their energy conversion efficiency.

Alex Jen Kwan-yue’s team from the City University of Hong Kong in China recently overcame this hurdle by devising a new engineering strategy that has successfully suppressed this energy conversion loss.

This has made it possible to achieve unprecedented energy efficiency.

The best-performing organic solar cells developed by Alex Jen Kwan-yue’s team have achieved power conversion efficiency of more than 19%, and the team expects to exceed 20% very soon. The achievement is promising for the commercialization of organic solar cells.

The organic solar cells developed by Alex Jen Kwan-yue’s team have managed to break an efficiency record. (Photo: City University of Hong Kong)

Organic solar cells, based on organic semiconductors, are considered a promising candidate for obtaining clean energy, mainly due to the low toxicity of the materials from which they are made.

Alex Jen Kwan-yue and colleagues discuss the details of their technological breakthrough in the academic journal Nature Energy, under the title “Suppressed recombination loss in organic photovoltaics adopting a planar–mixed heterojunction architecture.” (Font: NCYT by Amazings)