Baselines for Lifetime of Organic Solar Cells

The process of accurately gauging lifetime improvements in organic photovoltaics (OPVs) or other similar emerging technologies, such as perovskites solar cells is still a major challenge. The presented work is part of a larger effort of developing a worldwide database of lifetimes that can help establishing reference baselines of stability performance for OPVs and other emerging PV technologies, which can then be utilized for pass-fail testing standards and predicting tools.

The study constitutes scanning of literature articles related to stability data of OPVs, reported until mid-2015 and collecting the reported data into a database. A generic lifetime marker is utilized for rating the stability of various reported devices. The collected data is combined with an earlier developed and reported database, which was based on articles reported until mid-2013.

The extended database is utilized for establishing the baselines of lifetime for OPVs tested under different conditions. The work also provides the recent progress in stability of unencapsulated OPVs with different architectures, as well as presents the updated diagram of the reported record lifetimes of OPVs.

The presented work is another step forward towards the development of pass-fail testing standards and lifetime prediction tools for emerging PV technologies.