Polymer solar cell
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Polymer solar cells are a type of solar cell: they produce electricity from sunlight. A relatively novel technology, they are being researched by universities, national laboratories and several companies around the world. Although not commercially available, prototype devices with power conversion efficiencies of 5% have been demonstrated.
Compared to silicon-based devices, polymer solar cells are lightweight (which is important for small autonomous sensors), disposable, inexpensive to fabricate, flexible, designable on the molecular level, and have little potential for environmental impact, however the energy yield is just slowly reaching levels of a 1/4 of regular silicon solar cells, and construction geometries have not been fully explored. Polymer solar cells also suffer from huge degradation effects: the efficiency is decreased over time due to environmental effects. Good protective coatings are still to be developed.
An open question is to what degree polymer solar cells can commercially compete with silicon solar cells. Although polymer cells are relatively inexpensive to manufacture, the silicon solar cell industry has the important industrial advantage of being able to leverage the general silicon infrastructure developed for the computer industry. This, however, also has the disadvantage that solar cell manufacturers have to compete with the (much larger) computer industry for supplies of high-quality silicon.
Efficiency remains challenging for this type of technology. Traditional silicon cells do much better and deliver around 15% efficiency. The highest efficiency are achieved by the solar cells used to power space satellites. Efficiencies of up to 40% have been demonstrated with these speciality cells but the corresponding cost has been two orders of magnitude above the common silicon cells.[1] Device stability is a major issue for organic/polymer solar cells as well.
