Title: Balanced Partnership between Donor and Acceptor Components in Nonfullerene Organic Solar Cells with >12% Efficiency

Abstract

Abstract Relative to electron donors for bulk heterojunction organic solar cells (OSCs), electron acceptors that absorb strongly in the visible and even near‐infrared region are less well developed, which hinders the further development of OSCs. Fullerenes as traditional electron acceptors have relatively weak visible absorption and limited electronic tunability, which constrains the optical and electronic properties required of the donor. Here, high‐performance fullerene‐free OSCs based on a combination of a medium‐bandgap polymer donor (FTAZ) and a narrow‐bandgap nonfullerene acceptor (IDIC), which exhibit complementary absorption, matched energy levels, and blend with pure phases on the exciton diffusion length scale, are reported. The single‐junction OSCs based on the FTAZ:IDIC blend exhibit power conversion efficiencies up to 12.5% with a certified value of 12.14%. Transient absorption spectroscopy reveals that exciting either the donor or the acceptor component efficiently generates mobile charges, which do not suffer from recombination to triplet states. Balancing photocurrent generation between the donor and nonfullerene acceptor removes undesirable constraints on the donor imposed by fullerene derivatives, opening a new avenue toward even higher efficiency for OSCs.

Authors:

Lin, Yuze ^[1]; Zhao, Fuwen ^[2]; Prasad, Shyamal K. K. ^[3]; Chen, Jing‐De ^[4]; Cai, Wanzhu ^[5]; Zhang, Qianqian ^[6]; Chen, Kai ^[3]; Wu, Yang ^[7]; Ma, Wei ^[7]; Gao, Feng ^[5]; Tang, Jian‐Xin ^[4]; Wang, Chunru ^[2]; You, Wei ^[6]; Hodgkiss, Justin M. ^[3]; Zhan, Xiaowei  ^[1]

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+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering College of Engineering Key Laboratory of Polymer Chemistry and Physics of Ministry of Education Peking University Beijing 100871 China
2. Institute of Chemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190 China
3. MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology School of Chemical and Physical Sciences Victoria University of Wellington Wellington 6010 New Zealand
4. Institute of Functional Nano and Soft Materials (FUNSOM) Soochow University Suzhou 215123 China
5. Biomolecular and Organic Electronics IFM Linköping University Linköping 58183 Sweden
6. Department of Chemistry University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill NC 27599 USA
7. State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an 710049 China

Publication Date:

Wed Mar 07 00:00:00 EST 2018

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE

OSTI Identifier:

1424539

Grant/Contract Number:  

DE‐AC02‐05CH11231

Resource Type:

Publisher's Accepted Manuscript

Journal Name:

Advanced Materials

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Name: Advanced Materials Journal Volume: 30 Journal Issue: 16; Journal ID: ISSN 0935-9648

Publisher:

Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)

Country of Publication:

Germany

Language:

English