Roll-to-roll printed silver nanowires for increased stability of flexible ITO-free organic solar cell modules

We report the use of roll-to-roll printed silver nanowire networks as front electrodes for fully roll-to-roll processed flexible indium-tin-oxide (ITO) free OPV modules. We prepared devices with two types of back electrodes, a simple PEDOT:PSS back electrode and a PEDOT:PSS back electrode with a printed silver grid in order to simultaneously explore the influence of the back electrode structure on the operational stability of the modules that did not include any UV-protection.

We subjected the devices to stability testing under a number of protocols recommended by the international summit on OPV stability (ISOS). We explored accelerated ISOS-D-2, ISOS-D-3, ISOS-L-2, ISOS-L-3, ISOS-O-1 and ISOS-O-2 testing protocols and compared the performance to previous reports employing the same testing protocols on devices with PEDOT:PSS instead of the silver nanowires in the front electrode.

We find significantly increased operational stability across all ISOS testing protocols over the course of the study and conclude that replacement of PEDOT:PSS in the front electrode with silver nanowires increase operational stability by up to 1000%. The duration of the tests were in the range of 140–360 days.

The comparison of front and back electrode stability in this study shows that the modules with silver nanowire front electrodes together with a composite back electrode comprising PEDOT:PSS and a silver grid present the best operational stability.