Elaboration of P3HT/CNT/PCBM Composites for Organic Photovoltaic Cells

This Full Paper focuses on the preparation of single‐walled or multi‐walled carbon nanotube solutions with regioregular poly(3‐hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and a fullerene derivative 1‐(3‐methoxycarbonyl) propyl‐1‐phenyl[6,6]C61 (PCBM) using a high dissolution and concentration method to exactly control the ratio of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to the P3HT/PCBM mixture and disperse the CNTs homogeneously throughout the matrix. The CNT/P3HT/PCBM composites are deposed using a spin‐coating technique and characterized by absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy and by atomic force microscopy to underline the structure and the charge transfer between the CNTs and P3HT. The performance of photovoltaic devices obtained using these composites as a photoactive layer mainly show an increase of the short circuit current and a slight decrease of the open circuit voltage which generally leads to an improvement of the solar cell performances to an optimum CNT percentage. The best results are obtained with a P3HT/PCBM (1 : 1) mixture with 0.1 wt % multi‐walled carbon nanotubes with an open circuit voltage (Voc) of 0.57 V, a current density at the short‐circuit (Isc) of 9.3 mA cm–2 and a fill factor of 38.4 %, which leads to a power conversion efficiency of 2.0 % (irradiance of 100 mW cm–2 spectroscopically distributed following AM1.5). Blends of single‐walled and multi‐walled carbon nanotubes with P3HT/PCBM (where P3HT is regioregular poly(3‐hexylthiophene and PCBM is a fullerene derivative 1‐(3‐methoxycarbonyl) propyl‐1‐phenyl[6,6]C61), obtained from a high dilution and concentration process, are cast using spin coating. The films are characterized by atomic force microscopy and spectroscopy and tested on photovoltaic cell devices.