Graphene for Transparent Electrodes and Organic Electronic Devices - Organic Solar Cells: Materials and Device Physics - page 98

The graphene-based patterns printed on plastic substrates demonstrated a high
electrical conductivity after thermal reduction, and more importantly, they retained
the same conductivity over severe bending cycles (Fig. 4.10 h). Accordingly, flex-
ible electric circuits and a hydrogen peroxide chemical sensor were fabricated and
showed excellent performances, demonstrating the applications of this simple and
practical inkjet printing technique using graphene inks.
These results indicate that graphene could be an ideal material for fabricating
the highly demanded all-carbon, flexible devices and electronics using the simple
and efficient printing and spin-coating process and that the long-sought dream for
all-carbon and flexible electronics is now much closer to reality.
4.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, transparent electrodes based on graphene and application of
graphene in the electronic devices, especially OPVs, have been discussed. For
transparent electrode, graphene has exhibited great potentials and achieved
promising initial results. Improving the conductivity without sacrifice of the
transparency is the first consideration for the further study. For OPVs using
graphene as the transparent electrode or acceptor materials, the performance is still
lower than that using the conventional materials. However, the performance such
as PCE is more a device parameter than an intrinsic material parameter. Keep in
mind that all the studies have been in the very initial stage for only 2-3 years.
Therefore, there is great room for the improvement of the devices performance
including that of all-carbon electronic devices. We fully expect that graphene is a
great promising material in organic electronic devices and more and more exciting
research results would be achieved in this direction.
Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the NSFC
(Grants 50933003, 50902073 and 50903044), MOST (Grants 2009AA032304, 2011CB932602
and 2011DFB50300) and NSF of Tianjin City (Grant 10ZCGHHZ00600)
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