title: Rapid and Checkable Electrical Post-Treatment Method for Organic Photovoltaic Devices.
abstract: Post-treatment processes improve the performance of organic photovoltaic devices by changing the microscopic morphology and configuration of the vertical phase separation in the active layer. Thermal annealing and solvent vapor (or chemical) treatment processes have been extensively used to improve the performance of bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices. In this work we introduce a new post-treatment process which we apply only electrical voltage to the BHJ-OPV devices. We used the commercially available P3HT [Poly(3-hexylthiophene)] and PC61BM (Phenyl-C61-Butyric acid Methyl ester) photovoltaic materials as donor and acceptor, respectively. We monitored the voltage and current applied to the device to check for when the post-treatment process had been completed. This electrical treatment process is simpler and faster than other post-treatment methods, and the performance of the electrically treated solar cell is comparable to that of a reference (thermally annealed) device. Our results indicate that the proposed treatment process can be used efficiently to fabricate high-performance BHJ-OPV devices.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, 440-746, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Sangheon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Park
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, 440-746, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Yu-Seong
authors.initials: YS
authors.lastname: Seo
authors.affiliation: Division of Advanced Materials, Center for Solar Energy Materials, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Daejeon, 305-600, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Won Suk
authors.initials: WS
authors.lastname: Shin
authors.affiliation: Division of Advanced Materials, Center for Solar Energy Materials, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Daejeon, 305-600, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Sang-Jin
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Moon
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, 440-746, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Jungseek
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hwang