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Reflective type Solar-LCDs by using polarizing polymer solar cells

Yoon Ho Huh, Jung Chul Shin, Young Chan Kim, and Byoungchoo Park

Open Access Open Access

Abstract

We present herein the results of a study of the reflective polarizing photovoltaic (PV) effects in an aligned polymer bulk-heterojunction PV layer. The PV layer consisted of a composite of regioregular poly(3-hexylthiophene) and methanofullerene (P3HT:PCBM) and the fairly uniform in-plane alignment of the P3HT:PCBM PV layer was achieved by means of a simple rubbing technique. The macroscopic axial orientation of the P3HT polymer in the aligned PV layer was observed to be significantly increased in the direction of rubbing with an axial orientational order parameter of 0.40. Moreover, it was also found that the reflective polarizing polymer solar cells (PSCs) that contained the aligned P3HT:PCBM layers exhibited a greater degree of anisotropy of 1.60 for the PV efficiencies under polarized illumination along the two principal axes. These reflective polarizing PSCs were applied to new reflective type solar cell-liquid crystal displays (Solar-LCDs), which exhibited a contrast ratio of 1.7. These results form a promising foundation for various energy-harvesting polarization-dependent opto-electrical Solar-LCD device applications.

©2012 Optical Society of America

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Figures (5)
Fig. 1
Fig. 1 (a) Schematic of rubbing process for in-plane aligned PV layers. (b) AFM images of the reference layer (Left panel) and the rubbed sample layer (Right panel). The x-axis represents the direction of rubbing.

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Fig. 2
Fig. 2 (a) Polarized transmission and absorption (inset) spectra of the reference and sample layers for incident light polarized parallel (||) and perpendicular (┴) to the x-direction of the layers. (b) Polarizing microscopic textures of the sample layer at four angles of rotation of the layers under an optical polarizing microscope. The white arrows indicate the rubbing (x-) direction and the orientation of the crossed polarizers is shown by the crossed arrows (A, P).

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Fig. 3
Fig. 3 (a) Schematic structure of the reflective polarizing PSC containing an in-plane aligned PV layer. The red arrows indicate the polarization of the propagating light. (b) J-V characteristics of the reference and sample cells in the dark and under illumination. The inset shows a semilogarithmic plot of the performance of the sample cell in the dark and under illumination. (c) IPCE spectra of the reference and sample cells. (d) Polarization-dependent J-V characteristics of the PSCs under polarized illumination.

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Fig. 4
Fig. 4 Structure of the reflective Solar-LCD pixels (dark and bright), consisting of a linear sheet polarizer, TN-LC pixels, and a reflective polarizing PSC with normal black mode.

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Fig. 5
Fig. 5 (a) Voltage-dependent ION/IOFF of reflective Solar-LCD in the normal black condition. (b) Photograph of reflective Solar-LCD in operation displaying “12:00” in the normal black mode using a reflective polarizing PSC (inside dotted square) under ambient room light illumination. The inset figure shows that the polarizing PSC generated electricity (*) from ambient illumination.

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Tables (1)

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Table 1 Device performance of reference and sample BHJ PSCs studied in this work.

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