[14p-303-1~18] 12.5 Organic solar cells

▲ [14p-303-11] Enhancement of the Efficiency of Thin-film Organic Solar Cells and Thin-film TiO₂ by Plasmonic Nano-objects

〇(PC)Supeera Nootchanat^1,2, Apichart Pangdam^1,2, Ryousuke Ishikawa¹, Kanet Wongravee², Kazunari Shinbo¹, Keizo Kato¹, Chutiparn Lertvachirapaiboon¹, Futao Kaneko¹, Sanong Ekgasit², Akira Baba¹ (1.Graduate School of Science and Techonology and Center for Transdisciplinary Research, Niigata University, Niigata, Japan, 2.Sensor Research Unit, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University Bangkok, Thailand)

Keywords:thin-film organic solar cells, grating-coupled surface plasmon, localized surface plasmon

Nowadays, solar light has gained more attraction as it provides the unlimited-alternative energy resource. Thin-film organic solar cells (thin-film OSCs) have become one of the best choice for alternative energy harvesters by converting the incident solar light to electricity. Availability of several potential advantages (i.e., lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive) leads the global expansion of thin-film OSCs usages. However, low light absorption of thin-film OSCs which was limited by nano-scale architecture of thin-laminated films, is still the imperative weakness and it has been under consideration for the improvement. To overcome this problem, our research team have focused on utilization of plasmonic properties of different kind of nano-objects (i.e., metallic grating and metal nanostructures) to improve the efficiency of thin-film OSCs. For the metallic grating, introducing the patterns of periodic grating (Blu-ray disc recordable, BD-R) and quasi-random (Blu-ray disc, BD) on the thin-film OSCs gives the improvement of efficiency up to 19.28% and 3.21% for BD-R and BD devices, respectively, when compared with the flat devices. The details of the physical studies suggest that the light scattering and grating-coupled surface plasmon (GCSPR) induce the increase of light absorption of the active layers resulting in the improvement of the devices performance. Meanwhile, utilization of urchin-like gold nanoparticles (UL-AuNPs) in the OSCs could improve the efficiency of the devices up to 5.86%, which was originated by localized surface plasmon (LSPR) at the tip of the nanothorns. We also employed gold quantum dots, which were embedded inside the OSCs devices, as the internal light illuminators to improve the performance of the devices with the maximum efficiency enhancement of 10%. Not only the OSCs with plasmonic nano-objects, we also investigated the utilization of plasmon to enhance the photocatalytic property of TiO₂ in water-splitting reaction. The combination between LSPR of gold nanoparticles and GCSPR of gold-coated grating were fist reviewed on the photocatalytic property of TiO₂ and it provides a remarkable improvement on the photocatalytic activity of TiO₂ in water-splitting reaction.