Transparent, dip-coated silver nanowire electrodes for small molecule organic solar cells

Percolation networks from silver nanowires can be used as a transparent electrode and promising alternative to the commonly used ITO. Here, the deposition of such a nanowire based network by dip coating, a versatile and scalable method, is described and characterized in detail. After identifying appropriate processing parameters, nanowire grids with conductivity and transmittance values rivaling ITO have been achieved. As a main issue, the roughness of the film was addressed and the influence on the device in terms of shunt paths was investigated. Using this network as anode, small molecule organic solar cells with varying stack structure were fabricated and yield efficiencies comparable to cells on ITO.

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► AgNW networks are obtained by reproducible dip-coating method, which is in principle scalable and suitable for roll-to-roll.
► ITO like electrode performance was achieved with the network.
► Planarizing PEDOT:PSS is sufficient for depositing a thin sm-OSC of less than 100 nm on top of electrode.
► Solar cell efficiencies of 2.3% and 2.5% were obtained for AgNW and ITO, respectively.
► To the best of our knowledge, efficiency is the highest reported for small molecule OSC on AgNW electrodes.