For optimizing the performance of photovoltaic devices, fabricating ternary organic solar cells (TOSCs) is a common strategy. However, the hybrid system involves complex intermolecular interactions, which poses a challenge to...

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A liquid crystal small molecule donor BTR-Cl, which has strong self-assembly and crystallinity, is used as the third component to construct nonfullerenes ternary solar cells together with a broad-band donor polymer D18-Cl and a low-band acceptor N3. The introduction of BTR-Cl enhances the morphology, exciton dissociation, and charge mobility of the ternary blends, improves the short-circuit current density and fill factor, and results in an efficiency of up to 17.92%. Further results show that BTR-Cl acts as an energy level mediator, fluorescence resonance energy transfer and charge transfer intermediary, and morphology modifier in ternary blends. They work synergistically in ternary blends to optimize the electrical and morphological properties, resulting in enhanced photovoltaic performance and improved stability and detection performance. It brings vitality to the field of organic solar cells (OSCs) and organic photodetectors (OPDs) research.

Hydrogen formed between accepter Y6 and interlayer 2N-SAM can improve device performance.

Additive strategy is considered to be an effective way to achieve high-efficiency organic solar cells (OSCs). However, for heat-sensitive material systems, such as D18 and its derivatives, solvent additives with high-boiling points that need to be fully removed by high-temperature annealing often fail to optimize the device performance. Herein, based on the D18-Cl:Y6-based device, we chose the volatile solvent tetrahydrofuran (THF) as the solvent additive, which can achieve effects similar to high-boiling-point additives without thermal annealing. The addition of THF effectively improves the charge transport and film morphology of the active layer, the fill factor (FF) of the device is increased from 74.20 to 75.91%, and the photoelectric conversion efficiency (PCE) is increased from 16.85 to 17.70%. Further research compared the effects of THF and its derivatives and structural analogs on the device performance and explored the effect of THF on the device performance of different material systems, and the results show that volatile solvent additives have certain generality in improving film morphology. Our results indicate that the selection of volatile solvents as solvent additives is a promising strategy that can effectively improve the performance of OSCs.