Description
In the last two decades, there has been a remarkable increase in environmental consequences associated with sources of energy production, specially their carbon footprints. Additionally, with the depletion of fossil fuels at an alarming rate, renewable energy resources have proven to be one of the greatest solutions to balance the need for a sustainable future. Of all the available renewable resources, solar has the capacity to practically generate ten times the energy demand by occupying just 0.16 % of the landmass. In the late 70’s with the discovery of conductive polymers, a new category of solar cells based on organic semiconductors has emerged. Despite its substantially lower power conversion efficiency than their inorganic counterparts, these are considered one of the promising alternatives to solve the world’s energy demands due to their flexibility, zero carbon emission, light weight, ability to be applied on building architecture and its low production cost. However, this technology uses Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) as an electrode material and as indium is an expensive and rare element, it limits the application to address large scale energy demand. In this thesis, we investigate the use of graphene, which is known to be one of the most important discovery of the decade due to its extraordinary electrical, thermal and optical properties, as an anode material. This work demonstrates a novel implementation of graphene on 3D organic solar cells. The performance of 3D and 2D OSC’s were compared using optical, electrical and material characterization techniques and a remarkable efficiency of 5.35 % was achieved on a 2D substrate which was by far the highest achieved efficiency associated to graphene-based OSC’s at NanoFab lab SDSU. Fabrication protocol for graphene-based 3D OSC’s were optimized using DOE. Further, the composition of donor- acceptor material concentration in the photoactive ink was varied to identify the optimal ratio for superior performance.
