Drift-Diffusion Modeling of the Effects of Structural Disorder and Carrier Mobility on the Performance of Organic Photovoltaic Devices

Solar cells based on organic polymers could serve as a cheap, renewable energy source, but their adoption has been hampered by poor performance due to the disorder inherent to their constituent materials. The authors present a simple one-dimensional model to investigate the deleterious effects of structural disorder on bulk heterojunction solar cells. Little work has been done on this aspect of photovoltaic design, and this study is bound to influence not just device engineering, but also more sophisticated models for finer assessment.