Amorphous Silicon particles/Polyaniline composites for hybrid photovoltaic solar cell: An experimental feasibility study

Hybrid heterojunctions of Polyaniline/Amorphous Silicon (PAni / a-Si:H) were synthesized in order to fabricate the active layer of the polymeric solar cells. For this purpose, amorphous silicon nanoparticles were blended with polyaniline which was synthesized through oxidative polymerization. Then the resultant nanocomposite was applied on FTO in the FTO/ZnO/PANI:a-Si/Ag structure using the spin coating method. The effect of amorphous silicon content on light-harvesting efficiency was studied using the UV-VIS spectroscopy data, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and the incident photon to current efficiency (IPCE) analysis. PAni / a-Si:H nanocomposites were characterized structurally and morphologically using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis. Current-Voltage measurements of the photovoltaic cells based on PAni / a-Si:H nanocomposites showed that by increasing the amount of a-Si:H in the active layer by 40 Wt%, the efficiency of the cell increases up to 2k times compared to the cell made with pure PAni. Also, in general, cell efficiencies increased slightly with decreasing the size of amorphous silicon nanoparticles at a constant PAni / a-Si:H weight ratio. The impact of a-Si:H weight percent is more significant in the case of smaller silicon particles.