Tandem Organic Solar Cell Optimization Using Response Surface Methodology

Organic solar cells have many advantages such as their ease of manufacturing, flexibility, and low cost compared to perovskite and silicon solar cells. However, increasing their power conversion efficiency (PCE) is still challenging. In this paper, response surface methodology of design of experiments (DOE) is used to optimize the PCE of a tandem organic solar cell. The cell is based on boron sub-phthalocyanine to reduce the series resistance between the layers. The optimization process is performed by formulating an empirical polynomial regression model relating the PCE to the active layers' thicknesses. Design Expert software is used for model adequacy checking, response surface plotting and response optimization. The optimized thicknesses resulted in increasing the PCE by 47.7% compared to the conversion rate of the monolayered solar cell of the same materials.