New polymer donors and nonfullerene acceptors have elevated the performance and stability of solar cells to higher grounds. To achieve their full potential, they require their adaptation to scalable and cost‐effective solution manufacturing techniques for large area deposition. Likewise, formulating scalable solution‐based transport layer inks that are compatible with the photoactive layer is imperative. This manuscript reports the full integration of solution‐based transport layers and electrode alongside a PTB7‐Th:IEICO‐4F bulk heterojunction in inverted architecture through inkjet‐printing, resulting in power conversion efficiencies up to 12.4% opaque devices and 9.5% semitransparent devices with average visible transmittance values of 50.1%, including hole transport layer. The wetting envelope of the highly‐hydrophobic photoactive layer alongside the surface energy of candidate solutions and solvents allows the formulation of thick transport layer inks that are compatible with the drop‐on‐demand inkjet‐printing process and yield uniform and homogenous films. Moreover, the surface energy components of the donor and acceptor serves as a fingerprint to assess the vertical stratification of the photoactive layer with the inclusion of different solvents. This methodology addresses a scale‐up bottleneck of solution‐based transport layers for high‐efficiency organic cells, enabling its adaptation to high‐throughput techniques including slot‐die and roll‐to‐roll coating.
Accelerating the shift towards renewable materials and sustainable processes for printed organic electronic devices is crucial for a green circular economy. Currently, the fabrication of organic devices with competitive performances is linked to toxic petrochemical-based solvents with considerable carbon emissions. Here we show that terpene solvents obtained from renewable feedstocks can replace non-renewable environmentally hazardous solvent counterparts in the production of highly efficient organic photovoltaics (OPVs) light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and field-effect transistors (OFETs) with on-par performances. Using a Hansen solubility ink formulation framework, we identify various terpene solvent systems and investigate effective film formation and drying mechanisms required for optimal charge transport. This approach is universal for state-of-the-art materials in OPVs, OLEDs and OFETs. We created an interactive library for green solvent selections and made it publicly available through the OMEGALab website. As potential carbon-negative solvents, terpenes open a unique and universal approach towards efficient, large-area and stable organic electronic devices.
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