Effects of DNA and Pt-DNA electrodes on bulk heterojuction solar cells

Emre Yengel; Liang Wang; Mihrimah Ozkan; Cengiz S. Ozkan

doi:10.1117/12.826802

20 August 2009 Effects of DNA and Pt-DNA electrodes on bulk heterojuction solar cells

Emre Yengel, Liang Wang, Mihrimah Ozkan, Cengiz S. Ozkan

Proceedings Volume 7411, Nanoscale Photonic and Cell Technologies for Photovoltaics II; 74110B (2009) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.826802
Event: SPIE Solar Energy + Technology, 2009, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Employing DNA molecules provide opportunities for electronics and photonics applications, serving to enhance the device properties as active part of the device or being a linker agent to aid in the self assembly of nanostructures. In this work, the effects of two different sets of biological materials, stand alone DNA sequences and Pt-DNA nanowires on the device properties of bulk heterojunction solar cell devices are being investigated. During the metallization of DNA, a Pt ion activation process over the DNA backbone is followed by a reduction process, where positively charged Pt nanoparticles are assembled on the DNA sequences to form the Pt-DNA complexes via sequential ionic reduction. Pt nanowires 20 nm in diameter are obtained by optimization of the salt reduction parameters of this. Several solar cell devices consisting of Al/P3HT:PCBM/PEDOT:PSS/ITO layers, are fabricated where DNA sequences or the Pt-DNA nanostructures are placed in between the P3HT:PCBM and the PEDOT:PSS layers. Both DNA sequences and Pt-DNA nanostructures are spray coated onto the PEDOT:PSS layer before spin-coating the PEDOT:PSS polymer mixture. The effects of the DNA and Pt-DNA nanostructures are observed from the I-V characteristics under the standard AM1.5G 1 Sun Test Condition. We observe that both DNA sequences and Pt-DNA nanostructures improve the power conversion efficiency (PCE) by %12 and %25 respectively. We believe that this increase in PCE is provided by the enhancement of hole collection and a reduction of the recombination loses. In addition, improvement in the short circuit current (I_sc) is observed for the DNA containing network. Similar improvements in both I_sc and the open circuit voltage (V_oc) are observed for the Pt-DNA containing network. We hypothesize that while the high resistance of the DNA network limits charge collection, comparably low resistance Pt-DNA network improves this feature.

Citation Download Citation

Emre Yengel, Liang Wang, Mihrimah Ozkan, and Cengiz S. Ozkan "Effects of DNA and Pt-DNA electrodes on bulk heterojuction solar cells", Proc. SPIE 7411, Nanoscale Photonic and Cell Technologies for Photovoltaics II, 74110B (20 August 2009); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.826802

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