Flexible, highly efficient all-polymer solar cells

By Taesu Kim, Jae-Han Kim, T. Kang, Changyeon Lee, Hyunbum Kang, Minkwan Shin, Cheng Wang, Biwu Ma, Unyong Jeong, Taek‐Soo Kim and 1 more. Nature Communications, 2015

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All-polymer solar cells have shown great potential as flexible and portable power generators. These devices should offer good mechanical endurance with high power-conversion efficiency for viability in commercial applications. In this work, we develop highly efficient and mechanically robust all-polymer solar cells that are based on the PBDTTTPD polymer donor and the P(NDI2HD-T) polymer acceptor. These systems exhibit high power-conversion efficiency of 6.64%. Also, the proposed all-polymer solar cells have even better performance than the control polymer-fullerene devices with phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) as the electron acceptor (6.12%). More importantly, our all-polymer solar cells exhibit dramatically enhanced strength and flexibility compared with polymer/PCBM devices, with 60- and 470-fold improvements in elongation at break and toughness, respectively. The superior mechanical properties of all-polymer solar cells afford greater tolerance to severe deformations than conventional polymer-fullerene solar cells, making them much better candidates for applications in flexible and portable devices. All-polymer solar cells have advantages over fullerene-based solar cells due to improved stability and tunable chemical and electronic properties. Here, Kim et al.develop highly efficient and robust solar cells based on PBDTTTPD and P(NDI2HD-T), highlighting their potential in flexible and portable electronics.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49ee72e5ca82600e9c4050ed9b67cf1e569dda83