I mentioned the record bulkheterojunction solar cell from Solarmer recently:
8.13%, although on a small area of 0.1cm2. The evporated small molecule solar cells had almost 6% on a ~10 times larger area. On the SPIE Optics&Photonics conference in August in San Diego I heard inofficially that Heliatek achieved more than 6%, but now on foil. Even better: more than 7% (active area efficiency; about one percent-point less for the complete area) on a module with more than 70cm2! This one is not flexible, I believe. Amazing if you consider that the evaporation is by point sources. If these modules are encapsulated, they are said to have an extrapolated lifetime exceeding 10 years.
Several other topics I originally planned to write about are already outdated in as far as they have been published as papers. It seems that many groups present only work which had been submitted to a journal beforehand – not a bad thing, as these results are not known to the general public then.
Currently, there is a smaller annual Conference on Organic Photovoltaics taking place in Würzburg. Some well-known invited speakers are here, such as Jenny Nelson (Imperial), Christoph Brabec (Nürnberg), Serdar Sariciftci (LIOS), Vladimir Dyakonov (Würzburg), Peter Erk (BASF), Paul Blom (Holst Centre), Mats Andersson (Chalmers University, Sweden), Frederik Krebs (Risoe), Jens Hauch (Konarka), Martin Pfeiffer (Heliatek) and others. That’s why I have to stop writing now and start listening;-) So maybe see you here next year on 22nd September 2011.
[Update 17.9.2010] Martin Pfeiffer, CTO of Heliatek, presented the above mentioned efficiencies in his talk at yesterday’s conference. The 7.2% module consists of 7 stripes, each of which yielding about 7.7% individually: clearly, the upscaling losses are quite low. The active material seems to be based on thiophene oligomers. As for the future plans, they plan a proof-of-principle production line with 30cm width roll-2-roll, and throughput of 1 metre per minute. The system is anticipated to be up and running in mid 2011. Also, Pfeiffer promised news concerning higher efficiencies to be presented soon. We are waiting eagerly:-)
Notes on Disordered Matter 