Comparison between silicon based and organic based photovoltaic solar cells

Solar cells are made from donor and acceptor parts which contain semiconductor materials like silicon. Despite to their high efficiency, silicon base cells are relatively expensive mainly because of their high production cost. An alternative approach is organic solar cells fabricated from conductive polymers which provide many advantages over traditional cells. Unfortunately, these organic base cells show very low efficiency and they have limited solar conversion of 3-5% because of poor charge carrier mobility and limited absorption spectrum. The reduction of the production cost for silicon base cells from one side, and the increase of efficiency for organic base cells from other side are important issues of challenges currently. In this work the advantage of organic base cells over silicon cells were quantitatively evaluated. A new approach for high efficiency organic cells was presented by introducing silicon into conductive polymer. This approach overcomes some limitation of silicon base cells.

Silicon, Organic cell, Efficiency, Photovoltaic, Solar cells