Issue 27, 2017

Organic solar cells based on a polymer acceptor and a small molecule donor with a high open-circuit voltage

Abstract

Organic solar cells (OSCs) based on a small molecule donor (SD) and a polymer acceptor (PA) exhibit low power conversion efficiency (PCE) due to the limited number of small molecule donor–polymer acceptor combinations. In this work, we employ a polymer acceptor based on the double B ← N bridged bipyridyl (BNBP) unit to develop SD/PA-type OSCs. With poly[(N,N′-bis(2-hexyldecyl)-diamine-bis(difluoro-borane)-2,2-bipyridine)-alt-(2,5-thiophene)] (P-BNBP-T) as the acceptor and 7,7′-(4,4-bis(2-ethylhexyl)-4H-silolo[3,2-b:4,5-b′]dithiophene-2,6-diyl)bis(6-fluoro-4-(5′-hexyl-[2,2′-bithiophen]-5-yl)benzo[c][1,2,5]thiadiazole) (p-DTS(FBTTh2)2) as the donor, the OSC device shows a high open-circuit voltage (VOC) of 1.08 V and a PCE of 3.50%. The VOC is ca. 0.3 V greater than that of other OSCs based on p-DTS(FBTTh2)2 due to the larger offset between the HOMO energy level of p-DTS(FBTTh2)2 and the higher-lying LUMO energy level of P-BNBP-T. The PCE of p-DTS(FBTTh2)2/P-BNBP-T is higher than that of any other OSCs based on the p-DTS(FBTTh2)2/polymer acceptor blend reported so far. These results indicate that the BNBP-based polymer acceptors are promising for high-performance SD/PA-type OSCs. While the as-cast p-DTS(FBTTh2)2/P-BNBP-T blend film exhibits low molecular packing order and large-size phase separation, processing with solvent additive 1,8-diiodoctane (DIO) leads to continuous networks with small crystalline grains of p-DTS(FBTTh2)2 in the blend film. The resulting OSC device exhibits the best photovoltaic performance because of the improved exciton dissociation efficiency and charge transport ability.

Graphical abstract: Organic solar cells based on a polymer acceptor and a small molecule donor with a high open-circuit voltage

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
08 May 2017
Accepted
14 Jun 2017
First published
15 Jun 2017

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2017,5, 6812-6819

Organic solar cells based on a polymer acceptor and a small molecule donor with a high open-circuit voltage

Z. Zhang, Z. Ding, X. Long, C. Dou, J. Liu and L. Wang, J. Mater. Chem. C, 2017, 5, 6812 DOI: 10.1039/C7TC01996C

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