Degradation mechanisms in organic solar cells: Localized moisture encroachment and cathode reaction

Organic solar cells (OSCs) have been under intensive studies, due to their attractive properties such as large scale, low cost, lightweight. However, their short lifetime, compared with the inorganic counterparts, has placed a severe restriction on the potential applications. To reveal the cause of the short life, here we report the finding of two distinguishable degradation mechanisms, from a typical organic/polymeric solar cell, based on …