comprised of a conjugated polymer as the electron donor and a fullerene derivative as the electron acceptor. [2,3] Conventional fullerene acceptors like [6,6]-phenyl-C61 butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) may be unfavorable for practical application, due to the inefficient absorption in visible and near-infrared (IR) regions, fixed molecular structure, complex purification process, and other complications well-documented in the literature. [4][5][6][7][8] In addition, the morphology of polymer-fullerene blends is very sensitive to thermal annealing, solvent additive, film thickness, and especially D:A ratio, resulting in significantly different device performance. [9][10][11] Recently, people have shown that the integration of either polymeric or molecular acceptor into photovoltaic devices would be advantageous. The chemical structures of nonfullerene acceptor can be easily adjusted to tune their energy levels, and the conjugated molecule or polymer acceptor demonstrates enhanced absorption at long wavelengths relative to fullerenes. [12] Thus nonfullerene photovoltaics can have improved harvest of solar radiation, enhanced thermal and mechanical stability, and reduced open-circuit voltage loss. [13] To date, solution-processed nonfullerene solar cells based on polymer-polymer (all-polymer) and polymer-small molecule blend have achieved power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of 10% and 13%, respectively. [14][15][16][17][18][19] Exciton dissociation and charge transport are at the core of organic photovoltaics, which is strongly affected by the BHJ blend morphology. [20][21][22][23] In fullerene-based systems, the morphology of thin films is critical to the device performance and has been extensively studied. [24] How the blend morphology of nonfullerene blend affects device efficiency and stability is of growing interest as the PCEs of many nonfullerene solar cells now exceed the best fullerene devices. It is well known that the morphology has been largely influenced by the D:A blend ratio. Early studies on fullerene-based devices observed a drastic change in film morphology when fabricating the devices with increased acceptor content. [25][26][27][28] However, for nonfullerene solar cells, recent efforts mainly focus on materials synthesis and device optimization. To the best of our knowledge, systematical study on the effect of blend ratio on the device morphology, performance, and stability has not been reported, while it is of great importance to help achieve in-depth Tuning the blend composition is an essential step to optimize the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of organic bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells. PCEs from devices of unoptimized donor:acceptor (D:A) weight ratio are generally significantly lower than optimized devices. Here, two high-performance organic nonfullerene BHJ blends PBDB-T:ITIC and PBDB-T:N2200 are adopted to investigate the effect of blend ratio on device performance. It is found that the PCEs of polymer-polymer (PBDB-T:N2200) blend are more tolerant to composition changes, relati...

In this work, the way in which ambient moisture impacts the photovoltaic performance of conventional PCBM and emerging polymer acceptor-based organic solar cells is examined. The device performance of two representative p-type polymers, PBDB-T and PTzBI, blended with either PCBM or polymeric acceptor N2200, is systemically investigated. In both cases, all-polymer photovoltaic devices processed from high-humidity ambient conditions exhibit significantly enhanced moisture-tolerance compared to their polymer-PCBM counterparts. The impact of moisture on the blend film morphology and electronic properties of the electron acceptor (N2200 vs PCBM), which results in different recombination kinetics and electron transporting properties, are further compared. The impact of more comprehensive ambient conditions (moisture, oxygen, and thermal stress) on the long-term stability of the unencapsulated devices is also investigated. All-polymer solar cells show stable performance for long periods of storage time under ambient conditions. The authors believe that these findings demonstrate that all-polymer solar cells can achieve high device performance with ambient processing and show excellent long-term stability against oxygen and moisture, which situate them in an advantageous position for practical large-scale production of organic solar cells.

All-polymer organic solar cells offer exceptional stability. Unfortunately, the use of bulk heterojunction (BHJ) structure has the intrinsic challenge to control the side-chain entanglement and backbone orientation to achieve sophisticated phase separation in all-polymer blend. Here, we revealed that the P-iN structure can outperform the BHJ ones with a nearly 50% efficiency improvement, reaching a power conversion efficiency approaching 10%. This P-iN structure can also provide enhanced internal electric field and remarkably stable morphology under harsh thermal stress. We have further demonstrated generality of the P-iN structure in several other all-polymer systems. Considering the adjustable polymer molecular weight and solubility, the PiN device structure can be more beneficial for all-polymer systems. With the design of more crystalline polymers, the antiquated P-iN structure can further show its strength in all-polymer system by simplified morphology control and improved carrier extraction, becoming a more favorite device structure than dominant BHJ structure.

Colloidal quantum dot (CQD) solar cells processed from pre-exchanged lead sulfide (PbS) inks have received great attention in the development of scalable and stable photovoltaic devices. However, the current hole-transporting material (HTM) 1,2-ethanedithiol-treated PbS (PbS-EDT) CQDs have several drawbacks in terms of commercialization, including the need for oxidation and multilayer fabrication. Conjugated polymers are an alternative HTM with adjustable properties. Here we propose a series of conjugated polymers (PBDB-T, PBDB-T­(Si), PBDB-T­(S), PBDB-T­(F)) for PbS CQD solar cells as HTMs. Through polymer side-chain engineering, we optimize the model polymer PBDB-T to tune the energy levels, increase hole mobility, improve solid-state ordering, and increase free carrier density. CQD solar cells based on modified polymer PBDB-T­(F) exhibit a best power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 11.2%, which outperforms the devices based on conventional PbS-EDT HTM (10.6%) and is currently the highest PCE for PbS solar cells based on organic HTMs.

A multiple-passivation strategy by solution-phase ligand engineering in lead halide exchanged QDs ink is presented, which result in remarkably improved colloidal stability of QDs ink and enhanced device performance.