A strong regioregularity effect in self-organizing conjugated polymer films and high-efficiency polythiophene:fullerene solar cells

By Youngkyoo Kim, S. Cook, S. Tuladhar, S. Choulis, J. Nelson, J. Durrant, D. Bradley, Mark Giles, Iain McCulloch, Chang-Sik Ha and 1 more. 2006

2,154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Low-cost photovoltaic energy conversion using conjugated molecular materials has become increasingly feasible through the development of organic ‘bulk heterojunction (BHJ)’ structures1,2,3,4,5,6,7, where efficient light-induced charge separation is enabled by a large-area donor–acceptor interface2,3. The highest efficiencies have been achieved using blends of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and a fullerene derivative8,9,10,11,12, but performance depends critically on the material properties and processing conditions. This variability is believed to be influenced by the self-organizing properties of P3HT, which means that both optical13,14 and electronic15,16 properties are sensitive to the molecular packing. However, the relationship between molecular nanostructure, optoelectronic properties of the blend material and device performance has not yet been demonstrated. Here we focus on the influence of polymer regioregularity (RR) on the molecular nanostructure, and hence on the resulting material properties and device performance. We find a strong influence of RR on solar-cell performance, which can be attributed to enhanced optical absorption and transport resulting from the organization of P3HT chains and domains. Further optimization of devices using the highest RR material resulted in a power conversion efficiency of 4.4%, even without optimization of electrodes7.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2efa4afccd606fbedc05fecbff98ace255e45fd9

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Polymers and Plastics

Citations in the corpus

Solution-processable polymeric solar cells: A review on materials, strategies and cell architectures to overcome 10% (2015, methodology): “5% have been reported when samples with higher regio-regularity [34] and/or [6,6]phenyl C71-butyric acid methyl ester (PC70BM) instead of PC60BM are used.”