Ethanol‐Processable Polyfuran Derivative for Eco‐Friendly Fabrication of Organic Solar Cells Featuring Self‐Healing Function

Abstract

Over the last decades, organic solar cells (OSCs) have drawn tremendous research interest in academy and industry due to their intrinsic characteristics, i.e., facile solution processing engineering, chemical versatility of photovoltaic materials, rapid energy payback time, and so on. [1][2][3][4] Along with remorseless efforts paid to developing high-performance photovoltaic materials and innovating device engineering, OSCs can even rival with other established thin film photovoltaics in terms of the device efficiency. [5][6][7][8][9][10] More importantly, OSCs exhibit great potential application as indoor photovoltaics for their high efficiency, lightweight, and good flexibility. [11,12] Even though great progress has been achieved for OSCs in laboratory, there are still some critical issues that should be overcome for prompting their commercialization, i.e., material cost, eco-friendly processing, and device stability.Up to now, most of those reported high-performance photovoltaic materials are composed of fused-ring building blocks, which are always prepared via tedious and harsh synthetic processes, inevitably resulting in large production cost (>1000 $ g À1 ). [13][14][15] Obviously, it is unrealistic to realize cost-effective mass production of OSCs based on those fused-ring photovoltaic materials. Besides, high-performance OSCs almost adopted toxic organic solvents to fabricate, such as chloroform, toluene, chlorobenzene, and so on. [16,17] It is worth pointing out that those toxic organic solvents for OSCs are strictly inhibited in majority of countries for their seriously harmful feature to human health and ambient environment. [18,19] Furthermore, high cost and plenty of input energy are inevitably needed to produce, store, and dispose those toxic organic solvents, which would insert an additional burden for large-scale production of OSCs. [20,21] In addition to the abovementioned aspects, those high-performance photovoltaic materials are prone to irreversibly photodegrade especially for those emerging nonfullerene electron acceptor materials possessing fragile alkene group (C═C), which would greatly undermine the device stability. [22][23][24][25] Therefore, it is full of significance and challenge to rationally design photovoltaic materials to fulfill the criterions of ideal OSCs featuring low-cost, environmentally benign, and stable characteristics for the civilian application.

Asymmetric Π‐Bridge Engineering Enables High‐Permittivity Benzo[1,2‐B:4,5‐b′]Difuran‐Conjugated Polymer for Efficient Organic Solar Cells

“…Given the superior photovoltaic performance of PBDF-TF-BTz, ternary devices with PCBO-12 featuring low-lying E LUMO and high charge mobility as the third component were constructed. [29,30] As displayed in Figure 3c and Table S11, Supporting Information, the PCE of PBDF-TF-BTz-based ternary The units of μ h and μ e are 10 −4 cm 2 V −1 s −1 .…”

“…[27,28] Additionally, the three copolymers exhibit complementary light absorption with fullerene derivative PCBO-12 and non-fullerene small molecule Y6 (Figure 2b), which could lead to high photocurrent for derived OSCs. [29][30][31]…”

Molecular Order Imprint Polymerization of Furan–Thiophene-Based Monomers with Electrochemical Polymerization in Chiral Liquid Crystals

“…We also prepared monomers with branched structures and compared their reactivity in liquid crystals to those of monomers with a linear structure. Polyfuran has been developed previously as a conjugated polymer. − Polythiophene shows good electrochemical properties, while polyfuran depicts a good membrane-forming ability. We prepare furan–thiophene-based polymer films in Ch-LC and characterized them with polarizing optical microscopy (POM), circular dichroism (CD) absorption, UV–vis spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry (CV), reflectance spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM).…”

High-efficiency organic solar cells processed from a real green solvent

“…In this context, the development of photovoltaic materials processable from real green and eco-compatible solvents would constitute a major breakthrough in the field of OSCs, which will promote the mass production of OSCs without safety, health, and environment concerns. [33][34][35][36] The ''Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS)'' of the United Nations provides qualitative assessments as regards to the safety, health, and environmental impact for a large number of solvents via its ''Hazard and Precautionary Statements''. 37 Based on this, water, alcohols, and anisole are recommended or preferred in the solvent selection guides by many organizations and companies such as IMI-CHEM21, Pfizer, Sanofi, and GlaxoSmithKline (Fig.…”