Energy and Environmental Science features Nicola’s article on highly efficient ternary solar cells on the cover of its April issue
The concept of ternary blend organic solar cells allows to engineer solutions to the most of the limitations of binary solar cells. In his most recent article Nicola introduced a novel concept to overcome the charge transport limitations of many current generation polymer blends which typically require rather low active layer thicknesses (around 100 nm) for optimum performance. Here, in addition to extending the absorption window of organic solar cells by adding a near infrared polymer, Nicola demonstrates devices with unusually thick active layers (approx. 300 nm) and power conversion efficiencies beyond 11%. Motivated by the possibility to process thick-film devices based on ternary blends, we demonstrated solar modules consisting of three solar cells connected in series, delivering 8.2% and 6.8% power conversion efficiency on glass and flexible substrates, respectively.