Emerging Organic and Organic/Inorganic Hybrid Photovoltaic Devices for Specialty Applications: Low-Level-Lighting Energy Conversion and Biomedical Treatment

This article reviews the progress made in emerging photovoltaic devices, including dye-sensitized solar cells, organic solar cells, and perovskite solar cells, for specialty applications. Because they all feature tunable band structures, which can be modified through molecular design and/or altered compositions, the properties of emerging photovoltaic devices can be tailored to fit the special requirements of a particular application. For instance, they can be designed according to the emission spectrum of an artificial light source (e.g., fluorescence lamp and white light-emitting diode), thereby efficiently converting the indoor lighting to electricity. Furthermore, because there exists a near-infrared window—ranging from 650 to 1350 nm—in which photons can penetrate deeply into tissues, the absorption bands of these photovoltaic devices can be tailored specially to this therapeutic window to harvest tissue-penetrating light, thereby wirelessly providing power to biomedical devices positioned beneath the skin. The rapid progress made in these two representative areas suggests further promising applications of such emerging photovoltaic devices.