A Direct Evidence of Morphological Degradation on a Nanometer Scale in Polymer Solar Cells

Schaffer, Christoph J.; Palumbiny, Claudia M.; Niedermeier, Martin A.; Jendrzejewski, Christian; Santoro, Gonzalo; Roth, Stephan V.; Müller‐Buschbaum, Peter

doi:10.1002/adma.201302854

Cited by 183 publications

(224 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…11 For example, it has been shown that simply operating solar cells composed of blended materials generates enough heat to induce further phase separation and detrimentally increase domain sizes in semicrystalline materials. 12 This hinders application of these materials in industry where reproducibility and stability are crucial. In addition, a key advantage of OPV is the solution processability of these materials.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The synthesis and purification of amphiphilic conjugated donor–acceptor block copolymers

Mitchell

Wong

Thelakkat

et al. 2016

Polym J

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Nanoscale domains of donor and acceptor materials are crucial for charge generation in organic photovoltaic devices. These domains are difficult to achieve reproducibly in blended materials, but could be engineered into single-material active layers composed of donor-acceptor block copolymers (BCPs). In this work, we report the synthesis and purification of two novel fully conjugated BCPs, P3HT-b-PF TEG TBT and P3HT-b-PF TEG T6BT. To enhance phase separation and self-assembly, these two polymers incorporate tetraethylene glycol side chains into the PFTBT acceptor block, generating an amphiphilic system. The chemical disparity of the donor and acceptor blocks allowed the development of a purification strategy capable of isolating the desired BCP from homopolymer contaminants. This is a significant improvement over previous systems in which homopolymer contaminants can dominate the reaction mixture, affecting performance and morphology. We show that preliminary morphological analysis indicates spontaneous phase separation in thin films, demonstrating the efficacy of this design strategy and the potential application of these materials in organic photovoltaic devices.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The synthesis and purification of amphiphilic conjugated donor–acceptor block copolymers

Mitchell

Wong

Thelakkat

et al. 2016

Polym J

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“…20 A thorough understanding of their growth and structure is prerequisite to the efficient implementation on a technological basis, since the morphology of OSCs has a strong impact on their charge carrier mobility and other physical properties. 1,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] The basic understanding has largely remained on a qualitative level, since in most cases the film structure is not sufficiently well defined due to complex structural phenomena such as phase coexistence, changes in the molecular conformation or orientation, and morphological transitions. Thus there is the avid need to comprehend the different structural aspects of the hybrid structures like, e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

Structure and Morphology of Organic Semiconductor–Nanoparticle Hybrids Prepared by Soft Deposition

et al. 2015

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We present an extensive structural analysis of hybrid architectures prepared by the "soft" incorporation of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) within an organic semiconductor matrix of diindenoperylene (DIP). Such "soft" or non-invasive deposition of nanoparticles within organic semiconducting host matrices not only minimizes the influence of the deposition process on the order and properties of the organic host molecules but also offers additional control in the process of incorporation. The hybrid structures were characterized by X-ray scattering techniques including grazing incidence small angle scattering (GISAXS), grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GID), X-ray reflectivity (XRR) and complemented by atomic force microscopy (AFM), photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) measurements. We show that different strategies of incorporating the nanoparticles in the host matrix lead to drastically different structure and morphologies. Particularly remarkable is the morphological change observed in the matrix of DIP as well as the AuNPs due to the influence of organic solvents as evidenced by TEM tomography measurements which revealed the exact location of the AuNPs within the organic host. It is also demonstrated that AuNPs can be successfully used as tunable templates for the growth of the organic semiconductors with desired island sizes and distances.

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“…Next-generation photolithography tools in the extreme UV-wavelength regime (EUV lithography) [4] and directed self-assembly of block copolymer (BCP) thin films [5][6][7][8][9][10] are promising techniques for producing a wide variety of structures with great accuracy and dimensions down to several nanometers [11,12]. Not only microelectronics, but also other emerging fields like organic photovoltaics [13,14], nanotemplating [15,16], or surface functionalization [17,18] make increasing use of structuring in the nanometer range by thin film deposition, processing, and self-assembly techniques.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Traceable GISAXS measurements for pitch determination of a 25 nm self-assembled polymer grating

et al. 2014

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The feature sizes of only a few nanometers in modern nanotechnology and next-generation microelectronics continually increase the demand for suitable nanometrology tools. Grazing incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) is a versatile technique to measure lateral and vertical sizes in the nm-range, but the traceability of the obtained parameters, which is a prerequisite for any metrological measurement, has not been demonstrated so far. In this work, the first traceable GISAXS measurements, demonstrated with a self-assembled block copolymer grating structure with a nominal pitch of 25 nm, are reported. The different uncertainty contributions to the obtained pitch value of 24.83(9) nm are discussed individually. The main uncertainty contribution results from the sample-detector distance and the pixel size measurement, whereas the intrinsic asymmetry of the scattering features is of minor relevance for the investigated grating structure. The uncertainty analysis provides a basis for the evaluation of the uncertainty of GISAXS data in a more general context, for example in numerical data modeling.

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A Direct Evidence of Morphological Degradation on a Nanometer Scale in Polymer Solar Cells

Cited by 183 publications

References 27 publications

The synthesis and purification of amphiphilic conjugated donor–acceptor block copolymers

The synthesis and purification of amphiphilic conjugated donor–acceptor block copolymers

Structure and Morphology of Organic Semiconductor–Nanoparticle Hybrids Prepared by Soft Deposition

Traceable GISAXS measurements for pitch determination of a 25 nm self-assembled polymer grating

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