Polymer heterostructures with embedded carbon nanotubes for efficient photovoltaic cells

Polymer photovoltaic cells (PVC) are intensely investigated because of their potential advantages over Si-based PVCs. Their present drawbacks are low conversion efficiency, limited exciton diffusion length, poor hole carriers transport and short lifetime. The highest conversion efficiency achieved so far in spin-coated polymer blends is close to 5%. Recently, efficiency growing has been demonstrated in multilayer architectures involving a donor/acceptor bulk heterojunction. Alternatively, a nanomaterial has been added to the polymer active layer to facilitate excitons dissociation and carriers transport through the polymer matrix. In this work we investigate both these approaches, first embedding single wall Carbon Nanotubes (SWCNT) in the polymericmatrix to improve the electrical transport and second studying the optical absorption of different polymer thin films to optimize the spectral response of the donor/acceptor heterojunction. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.