A New Model for the Morphology of P3HT/PCBM Organic Photovoltaics from Small-Angle Neutron Scattering: Rivers and Streams
- University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK)
- ORNL
Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) have attracted increasing interest as a lightweight, low-cost, and easy to process replacement for inorganic solar cells. Moreover, the morphology of the OPV active layer is crucial to its performance, where a bicontinuous, interconnected, phaseseparated morphology of pure electron donor and acceptor phases is currently believed to be optimal. In this work, we use neutron scattering to investigate the morphology of a model OPV conjugated polymer bulk heterojunction, poly[3-hexylthiophene] (P3HT), and surface-functionalized fullerene 1-(3-methyloxycarbonyl) propyl(1-phenyl [6,6]) C61 (PCBM). These results show that P3HT and PCBM form a homogeneous structure containing crystalline P3HT and an amorphous P3HT/PCBM matrix, up to ca. 20 vol % PCBM. At 50 vol % PCBM, the samples exhibit a complex structure containing at least P3HT crystals, PCBM crystals, and a homogeneous mixture of the two. The 20 vol % PCBM samples exhibit behavior consistent with the onset of phase separation after 6 h of thermal annealing at 150 C, but appear to be miscible at shorter annealing times. This suggests that the miscibility limit of PCBM in P3HT is near 20%. Moreover, for the 50 vol % PCBM sample, the interface roughens under thermal annealing possibly owing to the growth of PCBM crystals. These observations suggest a different morphology than is commonly presented in the literature for optimal bulk heterojunctions. We propose a novel rivers and streams morphology to describe this system, which is consistent with these scattering results and previously reported photovoltaic functionality of P3HT/PCBM bulk heterojunctions.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1041095
- Journal Information:
- ACS Nano, Vol. 5, Issue 6; ISSN 1936-0851
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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