Al ink-jet Printed P3HT: PCBM organic solar cells on ITO-coated glass substrate

Printed electronics have surfaced with a lot of interest recently. This paper reports development of a non vacuum process for fabricating poly(3-hexylthiophene):[6,6]-pheny-C₆₁-butyric acid methyl ester organic solar cells (OSCs) using ink-jet printing technique. The printing conditions of different layers were optimized to avoid the coffee ring effect and the Marangoni effect. The effect of substrate's temperature and drop spacing size was compared to obtain uniform layers. We controlled the substrate temperature ranging from 30 °C to 80 °C and varied the spacing size between two lines ranging from 10 μm to 80μm during printing. The device characteristics were analyzed using alpha step and solar simulator. The optimized printed conditions for ZnO are 50 °C substrate temperature and 50 μm spacing size. For the active layer, PEDOT:PSS and Ag electrode, the optimized conditions are 50 DC/50 μm, 30 °C/30μm and 80 °C/80 μm, respectiveiely. The power conversion efficiency of the OSCs fabricated with optimized printing condition is 1.25%.