Abstract

Organic photovoltaic devices have received a lot of attention in recent years as potential replacements for typical silicon solar cells. We model the behaviour of such devices using a reaction-diffusion system based on the analogous system for silicon-based semiconductor devices. This talk will focus on the difficulties in adapting the standard drift-diffusion models for silicon photovoltaic devices to these new devices.

We will introduce the standard reaction-diffusion model for silicon photovoltaic devices, and then explain the changes necessary for modelling organic photovoltaic devices. We will then give a simple introduction to the methods for numerical simulation of these systems including a quick explanation of the Hybrid Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element method. Finally, we will briefly discuss some known analytical results for the silicon device equations and examine how to deal with some of the difficulties introduced in the organic modifications.