Fully Coated Semitransparent Organic Solar Cells with a Doctor-Blade-Coated Composite Anode Buffer Layer of Phosphomolybdic Acid and PEDOT:PSS and a Spray-Coated Silver Nanowire Top Electrode

Abstract

In the aim to realize high performance semitransparent fully coated organic solar cells, printable electrode buffer layers and top electrodes are two important key technologies. An ideal ink for the preparation of the electrode buffer layer for printed top electrodes should have good wettability and negligible solvent corrosion to the underlying layer. This work reports a novel organic-inorganic composite of phosphomolybdic acid (PMA) and PEDOT:PSS that features excellent wettability with the active layer and printed top Ag nanowires and high resistibility to solvent corrosion. This composite buffer layer can be easily deposited on a polymer surface to form a smooth, homogeneous film via spin-coating or doctor-blade coating. Through the use of this composite anode buffer layer, fully coated semitransparent devices with doctor-blade-coated functional layers and spray-coated Ag nanowire top electrodes showed the highest power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 5.01% with an excellent average visible-light transmittance (AVT) of 50.3%, demonstrating superior overall characteristics with a comparable performance to and a much higher AVT than cells based on a thermally evaporated MoO₃/Ag/MoO₃ thin film electrode (with a PCE of 5.77% and AVT of 19.5%). The current work reports the fabrication of fully coated inverted organic solar cells by combining doctor-blade coating and spray coating and, more importantly, demonstrates that a nanocomposite of a polyoxometalate and conjugated polymer could be an excellent anode buffer layer for the fully coated polymer solar cells with favorable interfacial contact, hole extraction efficiency, and high comparability with full printing.