Exploring alkylthiol additives in PBDB-T:ITIC blended active layers for solar cell applications*

Impressive advancements in solution‐processed bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells have been driven to a large extent by the rational design of conjugated polymers as photoactive donors. These achievements have been obtained without paying much attention to green metrics parameters (such as E factor) and to the increasing synthetic complexity (SC), which is a bottleneck for industrial scalability. In this context, a novel donor copolymer (PBDT3T) based on benzodithiophene and terthiophene building blocks with ester functionalities is synthesized. The 26‐fold‐reduced E factor for the benzodithiophene monomer synthesis and the SC index of 24 for PBDT3T, much lower compared with benchmark donor polymers, provide a hint for good scalability, sustainability, and low costs. PBDT3T features a relatively wide optical bandgap and a deep highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO), meeting the requirements for suitable donor material in both fullerene and nonfullerene‐based solar cells. PBDT3T is studied in binary and ternary blend, using PC71BM and ITIC as acceptors. The best performances are obtained in the ternary blend devices, reaching power conversion efficiency (PCE) values of 7.14%. Trade‐off considerations between PCE and SC make PBDT3T promising on an industrial perspective.

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A Donor Polymer with a Good Compromise between Efficiency and Sustainability for Organic Solar Cells

Penconi¹,

Bianchi

Nitti

et al. 2021

Adv Energy and Sustain Res

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Design of experiments with the support of machine learning for process parameter optimization of all‐small‐molecule organic solar cells

Wang,

Liang,

et al. 2024

FlexMat

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Traditionally, squaraine dyes have been studied and employed in biomedical research due to their excellent optical properties, and the molecules are being adopted in different research fields such as organic solar cells. In this study, we investigate correlations between solar cell performance and processing parameters of all‐small‐molecule bulk heterojunction solar cells comprising squaraine (SQ) as electron donor (D) and non‐fullerene small molecules (e.g., ITIC) as electron acceptor (A) with the help of machine learning (ML) and design of experiment (DoE) methods. Among the five predictive ML models tested with the selected parameters, the eXtreme gradient boosting model shows the satisfactory results with quite high coefficient of determination of 0.999 and 0.997 in training and testing sets, respectively. By measuring the contribution of each input variable to solar cell efficiency, four process parameters, that is, the total concentration, the ratio of D/A, the rotational speed of spin coating, and the annealing temperature, are found to be the key features strongly correlated to solar cell efficiency. From contour plots in DoE, the highest solar cell efficiency of approximately 5% can be predicted under the conditions of 15 mg mL−1 in solution concentration, a 1:2 mix ratio of D and A, rotational speeds ranging from 800 to 900 rpm, and annealing temperatures within 100–110°C. Using the suggested parameter conditions, we fabricated solar cells, achieving a quite high efficiency of approximately 4%. Besides the global optimization conditions, we also employ the solvent vapor annealing combination to the thermal annealing to facilitate further mobilization of molecules and more optimized microstructure of bulk heterojunction films, resulting in a further enhancement in solar cell efficiency of more than 20%.

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Charge Transport and Photovoltaic Properties of Conjugated Polymer PTB7:PC71BM Based Solar Cells

Ali

Moubah

Boulezhar

et al. 2020

Trans. Electr. Electron. Mater.

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Exploring alkylthiol additives in PBDB-T:ITIC blended active layers for solar cell applications*

Cited by 4 publications

References 50 publications

A Donor Polymer with a Good Compromise between Efficiency and Sustainability for Organic Solar Cells

A Donor Polymer with a Good Compromise between Efficiency and Sustainability for Organic Solar Cells

Design of experiments with the support of machine learning for process parameter optimization of all‐small‐molecule organic solar cells

Charge Transport and Photovoltaic Properties of Conjugated Polymer PTB7:PC71BM Based Solar Cells

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