Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Sep 23;28(10):330.
doi: 10.1007/s00894-022-05280-y.

The effect of positional disorder and the Beer-Lambert law in organic photovoltaics : A kinetic Monte Carlo simulation analysis

Renata Lopes Reis  1 , Demétrio A da Silva Filho  2
Affiliations

The effect of positional disorder and the Beer-Lambert law in organic photovoltaics : A kinetic Monte Carlo simulation analysis

Renata Lopes Reis et al. J Mol Model. .

Abstract

It is urgent to address climate change by radically changing our energy sources. Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are a competitive clean energy emerging technology and will undoubtedly have a market niche in a world that needs to take advantage of every possible type of renewable energy. Recent studies have brought relevant improvements on internal efficiency, focusing on two properties at the interface: energetic disorder and bending. However, how positional disorder affects internal efficiency is still an open question. Here, we show that positional disorder is desired at the interface, but only up to a threshold value of 0.2 nm for poly p-phenylene vinylene. Using a kinetic Monte Carlo simulator, we realized that not enough excitons were reaching the interface, and introduced the Beer-Lambert law of attenuance to correct it. Furthermore, we realized that the same disorder that facilitates charge separation at the interface diminishes exciton and charge mobility in bulk, so we propose here a new morphology for the active layer of OPVs. Our suggestion implicates in better overall performance, improving not just the internal but the overall cell efficiency.

Keywords: Beer-Lambert law of attenuation; Kinetic Monte Carlo simulation; Organic photovoltaics; Positional disorder.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Zheng Z, Yao H, Ye L, Xu Y, Zhang S, Hou J (2020) PBDB-T and its derivatives: a family of polymer donors enables over 17% efficiency in organic photovoltaics. Materials Today, 115–130, 35
    1. Wang H, Liu T, Zhou J, Mo D, Han L, Lai H, Chen H, Zheng N, Zhu Y, Xie Z, He F (2020) Bromination: an alternative strategy for Non-Fullerene small molecule acceptors. Adv Sci 7(9):5
    1. Firdaus Y, Corre VML, Karuthedath S, Liu W, Markina A, Huang W, Chattopadhyay S, Nahid MM, Nugraha MI, Lin Y, Seitkhan A, Basu A, Zhang W, McCulloch I, Ade H, Labram J, Laquai F, Andrienko D, Jan Anton Koster L, Anthopoulos TD (2020) Long-range exciton diffusion in molecular non-fullerene acceptors. Nat Commun 11(1):12 - DOI
    1. Hedley GJ, Ruseckas A, Samuel IDW (2017) Light harvesting for organic photovoltaics. Chem Rev 117(2):796–837 - DOI
    1. Brédas JL, Beljonne D, Coropceanu V, Cornil J (2004) Charge-transfer and energy-transfer processes in π-conjugated oligomers and polymers: a molecular picture. Chem Rev 104(11):4971–5003 - DOI