Short-Term Environmental Effects and Their Influence on Spatial Homogeneity of Organic Solar Cell Functionality

TL;DR

This study investigates how short-term environmental factors like humidity and oxygen affect the spatial uniformity and performance of organic solar cells, revealing humidity's significant role in degradation even without common hole-transport layers.

Contribution

It demonstrates that humidity causes localized insulating islands in organic solar cells, independent of the hole-transport layer, and provides detailed spatial analysis of degradation mechanisms.

Findings

Humidity induces insulating islands in the active layer.

Degradation is spatially heterogeneous with regions of severe and minimal damage.

Water transport through pinholes causes localized oxide formation at interfaces.

Abstract

Here, we focus on induced degradation and spatial inhomogeneity of organic photovoltaic devices under different environmental conditions, uncoupled from the influence of a hole-transport (HT) layer. During testing of devices comprising the standard photoactive layer of P3HT as donor, blended with PCBM as acceptor, a comparison was made between the nonencapsulated devices upon exposure to dry air, dry air with illumination and humid air. The impact on the active layer's photophysics is discussed, along with the device physics in terms of integral solar cell performance and spatially resolved photocurrent distribution with point-to-point analysis of the diode characteristics to determine the origin of the observed behavior. The results show that even without the widely used hygroscopic HT layer, PEDOT:PSS, humidity is still a major factor in the short-term environmental degradation of organic solar cells with this architecture, and not only oxygen or light, as is often reported. Different from previous reports where water-induced device degradation was spatially homogeneous and formation of Al2O3 islands was only seen for oxygen permeation through pinholes in aluminum, we observed insulating islands merely after humidity exposure in the present study. Further, we demonstrated with laser beam induced current mapping and point-to-point diode analysis that the water-induced performance losses are a result of the exposed device area comprising regions with entirely unaltered high output and intact diode behavior and those with severe degradation showing detrimentally lowered output and voltage-independent charge blocking, which is essentially insulating behavior. It is suggested that this is caused by transport of water through pinholes to the organic/metal interface, where they form insulating oxide or hydroxide islands, while the organic active layer stays unharmed.