•  National Institute of Materials Physics (NIMP) – Romania – Project Director: Dr. Marcela Socol
•  APEL LASER SRL – Partner Leader: Ionut Surupaceanu

The solar energy is an inexhaustible and CO2-free source involving relatively low-cost in its production. Lately, there is an increased interest to replace the silicon solar panels because they are rigid and require fixed installation points. The hybrid structures based on polymers and inorganic nanostructures featured by properties such as: high absorption coefficients, mechanical flexibility, low production costs, higher charge carrier mobility, thermal stability, represent a viable alternative in the PV cells area. The project scope is to improve the efficiency of some flexible organic and hybrid photovoltaic cells structures involving different donor-acceptor (D-A) systems and inorganic nanostructures (NS) in order to assure a better covering of the solar-spectrum. The optimization of the layers deposition process will be envisaged by a careful selection of the deposition parameters. New synthesized D-A polymers having arylenvinylene-ethynylene structure containing alternating donor units (triphenylamine or carbazol) and acceptor units (-CN or benzothiadiazole) in their backbone will be integrated in the PV cell structures. A special attention will be paid to the influence of the semiconducting ZnO NS (with different size and morphology) addition on the parameters of the obtained HPV cell structures. The output of the project will be flexible OPV and HPV structures based on D-A organic compounds and on ZnO NS for applications in photovoltaic cells field.