Pacific Rim Symposium on Surfaces, Coatings and Interfaces (PacSurf 2016)
    Energy Harvesting & Storage Wednesday Sessions
       Session EH-WeP

Paper EH-WeP10
Optimization of Si Quantum Dot Arrays in Inorganic-organic Solar Cells

Wednesday, December 14, 2016, 4:00 pm, Room Mauka

Session: Energy Harvesting & Storage Poster Session
Presenter: Yuuki Sugano, Tokyo Denki University, Japan
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Currently, silicon (Si)-based solar cells have been used extensively because of the possession of greater advantages such as high performance and high reliability. To expand the versatility and to reduce the production cost of the solar cells, inorganic-organic solar cells that combine Si quantum dots (SiQDs) with conducting organic polymers have been developed over the past several years. In the design of the highly efficient solar cells, the usage of strong wavelength range, i.e., 450-520 nm of sunlight is of crucial importance. The SiQDs can be freely controlled the bandgap width by the variation of size, enabling the selective absorption of sunlight. Therefore, it is necessary to uniform form the SiQDs on the substrate so as to maximize the potential abilities of the SiQDs. In this presentation, we will discuss the correlation between the morphology of the substrate surface and the configuration state of the SiQDs. The uniform arrangement of the SiQDs could be achieved by the formation of the micro-textured structures onto the substrate surface. Additionally, to investigate the absorbance characteristics of the substrates with SiQD arrays, we conducted the UV-vis analysis. As a result, the substrates with the SiQD arrays led to the higher absorbance compared to substrates without the SiQD arrays. Therefore, the optimizing the arrangement of the SiQDs becomes the most important factor in the performance improvement of SiQDs based on the inorganic-organic solar cells.