Recent progress in thick‐film organic photovoltaic devices: Materials, devices, and processing

Abstract

A successful transfer of organic photovoltaic technologies from lab to fab has to overcome a range of critical challenges such as developing high-mobility light-harvesting materials, minimizing the upscaling losses, designing advanced solar modules, controlling film quality, decreasing overall cost, and extending long-operation lifetime. To realize large-area devices toward practical applications, much effort has been devoted to understanding the fundamental mechanism of how molecular structures, device architectures, interfacial engineering, and light management and carrier dynamics affect photovoltaic performance. Such studies addressed various fundamental issues of charge carrier behavior in organic heterojunctions primarily in terms of exciton generation dependence upon light incidence, charge transportation dependence on built-in electric field, and charge extraction versus recombination. In consideration of high-throughput roll-to-roll process for large-scale fabrication of organic photovoltaic devices, it is highly appreciable to realize high power conversion efficiencies that are highly tolerable to the film thickness. Herein we summarize the recent progress in developing thick-film organic photovoltaic devices from the perspective of efficiency-loss mechanisms, material design, and device optimization strategies, proposing guidelines for designing high-efficiency thickness-insensitive devices toward mass production.

High-performance polymer solar cells with efficiency over 18% enabled by asymmetric side chain engineering of non-fullerene acceptors

“…Bulk heterojunction (BHJ) polymer solar cells (PSCs), as one of the most promising next-generation photovoltaic devices [1,2], have attracted considerable interest due to their versatile advantages of lightweight, flexibility, and ability to manufacture low-cost large-area devices [3,4]. In particular, PSCs with a incorporating conjugated polymer donor and a non-fullerene small-molecule acceptor (NFSMA) as an active layer have achieved significant advances due to continuous innovations in the development of efficient photovoltaic materials [5][6][7] and interface buffer layer materials [8], as well as the optimization of active layer mor-phology [9,10].…”

Dodecacyclic‐Fused Electron Acceptors with Multiple Electron‐Deficient Units for Efficient Organic Solar Cells

“…Organic solar cells (OSCs) have versatile features, such as semitransparency, light weight, and flexibility, endowing them with great potential for applications in flexible solar panels and building-integrated photovoltaics. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] The active layer with bulk heterojunction (BHJ) microstructure of OSCs is usually formed by a polymer donor and a molecular acceptor. [9] Compared with conventionally used fullerene-derived electron acceptors, nonfullerene electron acceptors (NFEAs) show significantly improved photovoltaic performance and great potential for applications.…”

Facile preparation of high loading filled PVDF/BaTiO3 piezoelectric composites for selective laser sintering 3D printing

“…With the rapid technological and economic development of our societies, an intelligent industry centered on new materials and new equipments is gradually rising all around the world. 1,2 Due to the ability to realize the mutual conversion of mechanical energy and electrical energy, [3][4][5] piezoelectric materials have aroused great interest in practical applications, and are widely used in sensing, energy storage, electronics and other elds. 6,7 For example, Li et al 8 demonstrated a non-lead (ZnO) piezoelectric device powered by heart movement.…”