High-efficiency and air-stable P3HT-based polymer solar cells with a new non-fullerene acceptor

By Sarah Holliday, R. S. Ashraf, Andrew Wadsworth, Derya Baran, S. A. Yousaf, C. Nielsen, Ching-Hong Tan, S. Dimitrov, Zhengrong Shang, N. Gasparini and 6 more. Nature Communications, 2016

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Solution-processed organic photovoltaics (OPV) offer the attractive prospect of low-cost, light-weight and environmentally benign solar energy production. The highest efficiency OPV at present use low-bandgap donor polymers, many of which suffer from problems with stability and synthetic scalability. They also rely on fullerene-based acceptors, which themselves have issues with cost, stability and limited spectral absorption. Here we present a new non-fullerene acceptor that has been specifically designed to give improved performance alongside the wide bandgap donor poly(3-hexylthiophene), a polymer with significantly better prospects for commercial OPV due to its relative scalability and stability. Thanks to the well-matched optoelectronic and morphological properties of these materials, efficiencies of 6.4% are achieved which is the highest reported for fullerene-free P3HT devices. In addition, dramatically improved air stability is demonstrated relative to other high-efficiency OPV, showing the excellent potential of this new material combination for future technological applications. In organic photovoltaics, the best performing devices usually involve low-bandgap polymers whose limited solubility and stability constrain the scalability of organic solar cells. Here, Holliday et al. develop a new acceptor and pair it with canonical P3HT to obtain 6.4% efficient and stable devices.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83b69750827f24ed5e72870fd38b6a2f2398a424