Burn‐in Free Nonfullerene‐Based Organic Solar Cells

Self Cite

112

140

Nonfullerene acceptors (NFAs) dominate organic photovoltaic (OPV) research due to their promising efficiencies and stabilities. However, there is very little investigation into the molecular processes of degradation, which is critical to guiding design of novel NFAs for long‐lived, commercially viable OPVs. Here, the important role of molecular structure and conformation in NFA photostability in air is investigated by comparing structurally similar but conformationally different promising NFAs: planar O‐IDTBR and nonplanar O‐IDFBR. A three‐phase degradation process is identified: i) initial photoinduced conformational change (i.e., torsion about the core–benzothiadiazole dihedral), induced by noncovalent interactions with environmental molecules, ii) followed by photo‐oxidation and fragmentation, leading to chromophore bleaching and degradation product formation, and iii) finally complete chromophore bleaching. Initial conformational change is a critical prerequisite for further degradation, providing fundamental understanding of the relative stability of IDTBR and IDFBR, where the already twisted IDFBR is more prone to degradation. When blended with the donor polymer poly(3‐hexylthiophene), both NFAs exhibit improved photostability while the photostability of the polymer itself is significantly reduced by the more miscible twisted NFA. The findings elucidate the important role of NFA molecular structure in photostability of OPV systems, and provide vital insights into molecular design rules for intrinsically photostable NFAs.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Twist and Degrade—Impact of Molecular Structure on the Photostability of Nonfullerene Acceptors and Their Photovoltaic Blends

Luke

Speller

Wadsworth

et al. 2019

Self Cite

112

140

“…[51,52] Moreover, the instability of morphology would also result from the crystallization of small molecule acceptor (SMA) in the blend film. [5] For instance, Durrant group [56] and Brabec group [57] reported burn-in free nonfullerene solar cells. [17,53,54] This nucleation would enhance growth of crystals due to the extra chemical potential of the SMA crystals, thus forming large crystals over time by depleting the mixed domains.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rational Strategy to Stabilize an Unstable High‐Efficiency Binary Nonfullerene Organic Solar Cells with a Third Component

Zhu

Gadisa

Peng

et al. 2019

141

143

decades, heuristic approaches have been successfully used to enhance the performance of OSCs, including synthesis of new donor and acceptor molecules, [5][6][7][8][9][10] optimization of the interface and morphology, [11][12][13][14][15] ternary blending, [16][17][18][19] and device engineering. [20][21][22][23] As a result, power conversion efficiency (PCE) of OSCs has surpassed 15% for single-layer bulkheterojunction systems. [24,25] As the PCE of OSCs is getting closer to the requirements for commercial applications and competing technology, the most efficient OSCs also need to perform consistently or maintain low efficiency loss throughout their lifetimes. [26][27][28] To make organic photovoltaics commercially viable and competitive, researchers have been making efforts on characterizing, understanding, and rationally engineering the long-term stability of OSC devices. [26,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] Generally, the performance degradation of OSCs comes from the oxidation of electrodes, degradation of the interface layers, and changes in the morphology of the active layer. Among these factors, the oxidation of electrodes and the degradation of the interface layers are attributed to exposure to oxygen and moisture, [39,40] and these drawbacks can be largely prevented by encapsulation. [41,42] However, the intrinsic instability of active layer morphology driven by light, temperature, and thermodynamics cannot be prevented by encapsulation. In-depth studies were carried out to understand the stability of the active layers under multiple stresses. [43] For instance, McGehee and co-workers [29] reported that solar cells based on amorphous materials would suffer from open-circuit voltage (V OC ) burnin degradation resulted from the impact of light-induced traps, and this degradation can be reduced by using materials with high degree of crystallinity. Brabec group [33] demonstrated that the light-induced [6,6]-phenyl-C 61 -butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) dimerization would lead to the short-circuit current density (J SC ) loss after aging, while this dimerization can be inhibited by a high degree of polymer-fullerene mixing and it can also be reduced via increasing the crystallization of the fullerene domains. Brabec and co-workers [34] found that burnin degradation driven by low miscibility is the major short-time Long device lifetime is still a missing key requirement in the commercialization of nonfullerene acceptor (NFA) organic solar cell technology. Understanding thermodynamic factors driving morphology degradation or stabilization is correspondingly lacking. In this report, thermodynamics is combined with morphology to elucidate the instability of highly efficient PTB7-Th:IEICO-4F binary solar cells and to rationally use PC 71 BM in ternary solar cells to reduce the loss in the power conversion efficiency from ≈35% to <10% after storage for 90 days and at the same time improve performance. The hypomiscibility observed for IEICO-4F in PTB7-Th (below the percolation threshold) leads to overpurific...

“…[14] Importantly, nonfullerene-based OSCs have demonstrated a significantly improved light-soaking and thermal stability. [15][16][17] And Kim et al found that the all-polymer photoactive layer with polymer donor and polymer acceptor demonstrated dramatically enhanced flexibility compared with the polymer/PCBM devices, which indicates that all-polymer materials are more suitable as the photoactive layer for the flexible OSCs. [18] Therefore, it is very important to further develop high efficiency donor and acceptor materials with ideal morphology, high flexibility and stability for the development of flexible OSCs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible and Semitransparent Organic Solar Cells

Cui

et al. 2017

632

449

Flexible and semitransparent organic solar cells (OSCs) have been regarded as the most promising photovoltaic devices for the application of OSCs in wearable energy resources and building‐integrated photovoltaics. Therefore, the flexible and semitransparent OSCs have developed rapidly in recent years through the synergistic efforts in developing novel flexible bottom or top transparent electrodes, designing and synthesizing high performance photoactive layer and low temperature processed electrode buffer layer materials, and device architecture engineering. To date, the highest power conversion efficiencies have reached over 10% of the flexible OSCs and 7.7% with average visible transmittance of 37% for the semitransparent OSCs. Here, a comprehensive overview of recent research progresses and perspectives on the related materials and devices of the flexible and semitransparent OSCs is provided.