Silver nanowire-graphene hybrid transparent conductive electrodes for highly efficient inverted organic solar cells

Silver nanowires (AgNWs) and graphene are both promising candidates as a transparent conductive electrode (TCE) to replace expensive and fragile indium tin oxide (ITO) TCE. A synergistically optimized performance is expected when the advantages of AgNWs and graphene are combined. In this paper, the AgNW-graphene hybrid electrode is constructed by depositing a graphene layer on top of the network of AgNWs. Compared with the pristine AgNWs electrode, the AgNW-graphene TCE exhibits reduced sheet resistance, lower surface roughness, excellent long-term stability, and corrosion resistance in corrosive liquids. The graphene layer covering the AgNWs provides additional conduction pathways for electron transport and collection by the electrode. Benefiting from these advantages of the hybrid electrodes, we achieve a power conversion efficiency of 8.12% of inverted organic solar cells using PTB7:PC₇₁BM as the active layer, which is compared to that of the solar cells based on standard ITO TCE but about 10% higher than that based on AgNWs TCE.