Organic photovoltaics for simultaneous energy harvesting and high-speed MIMO optical wireless communications

We show that organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are suitable for high-speed optical wireless data receivers that can also harvest power. In addition, these OPVs are of particular interest for indoor applications, as their bandgap is larger than that of silicon, leading to better matching to the spectrum of artificial light. By selecting a suitable combination of a narrow bandgap donor polymer and a nonfullerene acceptor, stable OPVs are fabricated with a power conversion efficiency of 8.8% under 1 Sun and 14% under indoor lighting conditions. In an optical wireless communication experiment, a data rate of 363 Mb/s and a simultaneous harvested power of 10.9 mW are achieved in a 4-by-4 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) setup that consists of four laser diodes, each transmitting 56 mW optical power and four OPV cells on a single panel as receivers at a distance of 40 cm. This result is the highest reported data rate using OPVs as data receivers and energy harvesters. This finding may be relevant to future mobile communication applications because it enables enhanced wireless data communication performance while prolonging the battery life in a mobile device.

Citation

Tavakkolnia , I , Krishnan Jagadamma , L , Bian , R , Manousiadis , P , Videv , S , Turnbull , G , Samuel , I D W & Haas , H 2021 , ' Organic photovoltaics for simultaneous energy harvesting and high-speed MIMO optical wireless communications ' , Light: Science & Applications , vol. 10 , 41 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-021-00487-9

Publication

Light: Science & Applications

Status

Peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-021-00487-9

ISSN

2047-7538

Type

Journal article

Rights

Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Description

H.H. acknowledges the financial support from the Wolfson Foundation and Royal Society. He also acknowledges financial support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under the Established Career Fellowship grant EP/R007101/1. The authors acknowledge the EPSRC for financial support from the program/project grants EP/K00042X/1 and EP/R005281/1. L.K.J. acknowledges support from a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (European Commission) (MCIF: no. 745776)