Regular Article

Combined effects of carriers charge mobility and electrodes work function on the performances of polymer/fullerene P3HT:PCBM based organic photovoltaic solar cell

EPSMS, FST Errachidia, University of Moulay Ismail (UMI), B.P. 509 Boutalamine, Errachidia, Morocco

^* e-mail: m.erray@edu.umi.ac.ma

Received: 21 February 2018
Received in final form: 25 June 2018
Accepted: 4 July 2018
Published online: 10 October 2018

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the effect of different parameters such as charge carriers mobility, electrodes work function, energy gap, series as well as shunt resistances on the performances of an organic photovoltaic cell based on polymer/fullerene P3HT: PCBM. Thus, numerical simulations have been investigated on ITO/PEDOT:PSS/P3HT: PCBM/LiF/Al structure with Analysis of Microelectronic and Photonic Structures the simulation one dimension (AMPS-1D) and General-Purpose Photovoltaic Device Model (GPVDM) softwares. The results show that the optimum efficiency is obtained for electron and hole motility values of 10⁻⁴ cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹ and 2 × 10⁻⁴ cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹, respectively. Moreover, we reported that the ohmic contact for both anode and cathode electrodes of the investigated device remains very important to get the maximum efficiency. Furthermore, when the gap energy increases, the efficiency is considerably improved, and reach's a value of about 5.421%. In addition, in this present work, the complimentary between the both softwares AMPS and GPVDM is also well illustrated as an original modeling approach to investigate the performances of organic photovoltaic cells.