A low cost and high performance polymer donor material for polymer solar cells

By Chenkai Sun, Fei Pan, Haijun Bin, Jianqi Zhang, Lingwei Xue, Beibei Qiu, Zhixiang Wei, Zhiguo Zhang, Yongfang Li. Nature Communications, 2018

669 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The application of polymer solar cells requires the realization of high efficiency, high stability, and low cost devices. Here we demonstrate a low-cost polymer donor poly[(thiophene)-alt-(6,7-difluoro-2-(2-hexyldecyloxy)quinoxaline)] (PTQ10), which is synthesized with high overall yield of 87.4% via only two-step reactions from cheap raw materials. More importantly, an impressive efficiency of 12.70% is obtained for the devices with PTQ10 as donor, and the efficiency of the inverted structured PTQ10-based device also reaches 12.13% (certificated to be 12.0%). Furthermore, the as-cast devices also demonstrate a high efficiency of 10.41% and the devices exhibit insensitivity of active layer thickness from 100 nm to 300 nm, which is conductive to the large area fabrication of the devices. In considering the advantages of low cost and high efficiency with thickness insensitivity, we believe that PTQ10 will be a promising polymer donor for commercial application of polymer solar cells. A problem that hinders the commercialization of polymer solar cells is the complication in synthesis and thus the low yield and high cost of the polymers. Here, Sun et al. synthesize a new polymer via a two-step process with a yield close to 90% and show high photovoltaic performance with efficiency of 12%.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12290a8f6a2c1faf34c99e1c2d3f15ae15d91439

How researchers see this paper

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Yang Yang
2. Gang Li
3. Pei Cheng
4. Sheng-Yung Chang
5. Z. Hong
6. Yongfang Li
7. X. Zhan
8. Jianhui Hou

In Polymers and Plastics

1. Yang Yang
2. Gang Li
3. Pei Cheng
4. Sheng-Yung Chang
5. Yongfang Li
6. Z. Hong
7. Jianhui Hou
8. X. Zhan

Citations in the corpus

• Transparent Polymer Photovoltaics for Solar Energy Harvesting and Beyond (2018, background): “The certified power conversion efficiency (PCE) of organic PV (OPV) has already exceeded 12% by a combination of novel materials and morphology optimization.(6,7)”