Organic Photovoltaics – A new source of solar power

30 July 2009

Organic photovoltaics is likely to be used for generating solar power and researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are hopeful to use in near future. Researchers at NIST have understood the mechanism of the complex organics films that can be used for generating solar energy.

In Organic photovoltaics, sunlight is directly fall on an organic film that convert it into electricity and this technique has many advantages than the conventional silicon cell base technology, which is presently used for converting sunlight into electricity. In photovoltaics, a simple chemical is spread across a large flexible area and the chemical arrays works as solar cells. The cost of manufacturing the technology is very low, however their application is limited.

The best photovoltaics manufactured so far have a conversion efficiency of around 6 percent and have limited life of couple of thousands hours and researchers are working hard to increase the conversion efficiency as well as the life. Researchers at NIST believe that if the conversion efficiency exceeds 10 percent with a life span of 10,000 hours, the technology adoption of organic photovoltaics will enhance significantly.

Researchers at NIST used a blend of polymer for absorbing sunlight, which ultimately loose lectrons in presence of sunlight and fullerenes were used for collecting the electron. Once the polymer blend is applied on a flexible surface, it hardens and form a film that contains a network of fullerenes.

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