Degradation pathways in standard and inverted DBP-C70 based organic solar cells

Sherafatipour, Golnaz; Benduhn, Johannes; Patil, Bhushan Ramesh; Ahmadpour, Mehrad; Spoltore, Donato; Rubahn, Horst‐Günter; Vandewal, Koen; Madsen, Morten

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-40541-6

Cited by 27 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 60 publications

(51 reference statements)

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“…It is worth noting that devices in the normal configuration degraded much faster as their V oc was reduced below 0.4 V values after 1 week under Nitrogen and after 2 days under ambient conditions (Figure S20, Supporting Information), perhaps coming from the change in work function resulting from degradation of both interfacial layers and metal contact. [ 73,74 ] Figure S21 (Supporting Information) presents contact angle measurements and AFM images of fresh and aged samples. The surface energy of all samples was reduced overall with a small increase in the polar component, suggesting some interaction of moisture with the BHJ.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ink Engineering of Transport Layers for 9.5% Efficient All‐Printed Semitransparent Nonfullerene Solar Cells

Corzo

Bihar

Alexandre

et al. 2020

Adv Funct Materials

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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.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ink Engineering of Transport Layers for 9.5% Efficient All‐Printed Semitransparent Nonfullerene Solar Cells

Corzo

Bihar

Alexandre

et al. 2020

Adv Funct Materials

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“…This potentially results in electrical shunting of the inverted OPV devices, which dramatically decrease the device yield for up-scaled cells. In recent work, this has also been demonstrated to lead to faster degradation of inverted OPV devices based on pure BCP ETL and EBL layers 35 . The integration of Ag doped BCP layers in inverted OPVs as buffer layers has previously been reported on 36,37 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inverted organic solar cells with non-clustering bathocuproine (BCP) cathode interlayers obtained by fullerene doping

Jafari

Patil

Mohtaram

et al. 2019

Sci Rep

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Bathocuproine (BCP) is a well-studied cathode interlayer in organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices, where it for standard device configurations has demonstrated improved electron extraction as well as exciton blocking properties, leading to high device efficiencies. For inverted devices, however, BCP interlayers has shown to lead to device failure, mainly due to the clustering of BCP molecules on indium tin oxide (ITO) surfaces, which is a significant problem during scale-up of the OPV devices. In this work, we introduce C 70 doped BCP thin films as cathode interlayers in inverted OPV devices. We demonstrate that the interlayer forms smooth films on ITO surfaces, resulting from the introduction of C 70 molecules into the BCP film, and that these films possess both improved electron extraction as well exciton blocking properties, as evidenced by electron-only devices and photoluminescence studies, respectively. Importantly, the improved cathode interlayers leads to well-functioning large area (100 mm 2 ) devices, showing a device yield of 100%. This is in strong contrast to inverted devices based on pure BCP layers. These results are founded by the effective suppression of BCP clustering from C 70 , along with the electron transport and exciton blocking properties of the two materials, which thus presents a route for its integration as an interlayer material towards up-scaled inverted OPV devices.

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“…Moreover, another outstanding issue is that the organic blends resulting from the BHJ approach often correspond to kinetically frozen states which have not reached thermodynamic equilibrium [89]. Not surprisingly, many cases of performance degradation due to nanoscale evolution of the BHJ morphology during device operation have been reported in the literature [90][91][92][93]. As a result, significant interest rises for strategies that can improve the performance of the devices through rational control and stabilization of the morphologies [61].…”

Section: The Donor/acceptor Interface (D/a-i) -Morphological Propertimentioning

confidence: 99%

Tackling Performance Challenges in Organic Photovoltaics: An Overview about Compatibilizers

et al. 2020

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Organic Photovoltaics (OPVs) based on Bulk Heterojunction (BHJ) blends are a mature technology. Having started their intensive development two decades ago, their low cost, processability and flexibility rapidly funneled the interest of the scientific community, searching for new solutions to expand solar photovoltaics market and promote sustainable development. However, their robust implementation is hampered by some issues, concerning the choice of the donor/acceptor materials, the device thermal/photo-stability, and, last but not least, their morphology. Indeed, the morphological profile of BHJs has a strong impact over charge generation, collection, and recombination processes; control over nano/microstructural morphology would be desirable, aiming at finely tuning the device performance and overcoming those previously mentioned critical issues. The employ of compatibilizers has emerged as a promising, economically sustainable, and widely applicable approach for the donor/acceptor interface (D/A-I) optimization. Thus, improvements in the global performance of the devices can be achieved without making use of more complex architectures. Even though several materials have been deeply documented and reported as effective compatibilizing agents, scientific reports are quite fragmentary. Here we would like to offer a panoramic overview of the literature on compatibilizers, focusing on the progression documented in the last decade.

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Degradation pathways in standard and inverted DBP-C70 based organic solar cells

Cited by 27 publications

References 60 publications

Ink Engineering of Transport Layers for 9.5% Efficient All‐Printed Semitransparent Nonfullerene Solar Cells

Ink Engineering of Transport Layers for 9.5% Efficient All‐Printed Semitransparent Nonfullerene Solar Cells

Inverted organic solar cells with non-clustering bathocuproine (BCP) cathode interlayers obtained by fullerene doping

Tackling Performance Challenges in Organic Photovoltaics: An Overview about Compatibilizers

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