Ternary organic solar cells with improved efficiency and stability enabled by compatible dual-acceptor strategy

Xiong, Minghai; Wu, Jiada; Fan, Qunping; Liu, Qi; Lv, Junfang; Ou, Xuemei; Guo, Xia; Zhang, Maojie

doi:10.1016/j.orgel.2021.106227

Cited by 21 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Owing to its experimental simplicity, the surface energy has been widely used to predict the miscibility of ternary blends. [9,17,66,[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88] Zhang et al reported the D1:D2:A type ternary blend based on D18-Cl:PM6:Y6. [73] The interfacial tension of γ D18-Cl:PM6 (0.25 mN m -1 ) was much smaller than that of γ D18-Cl:Y6 (0.73 mN m -1 ), and γ PM6:Y6 (1.37 mN m -1 ), suggesting the good compatibility of D18-Cl and PM6 donors.…”

Section: Predicting the Miscibility Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ternary Blend Organic Solar Cells: Understanding the Morphology from Recent Progress

2022

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layer with binary components, where the spontaneous phase separation of the electron donor (D) and electron acceptor (A) provide sufficient D/A interfaces for charge dissociation and continuous network for charge transport. [19,20] In principle, a strong absorbance with a broad absorption band of the photoactive layer is a prerequisite to maximize the harvesting of photons, thereby realizing high photocurrent of the OSC device. [21] In the early period, fullerene derivatives dominated the acceptors, which have low absorption ability, the donor materials contributed mainly to the light harvesting. However, common organic semiconductors intrinsically possess narrow absorption window (the full width at half maximum of the absorption spectrum is about 100-200 nm), which makes it very difficult to realize a broad plateau absorption coverage. [19][20][21][22] Therefore, the device performances were severely restrained to ≈12% for the fullerene-based OSCs. [23][24][25][26] Over the past few years, nonfullerene acceptors (NFAs) have witnessed rapid progress owing to their facile synthesis, easily tunable optoelectronic properties, and strong absorption even reaching the nearinfrared (NIR) region. [3] The largely extended absorption range was realized by pairing low bandgap (LBG) NFAs with the wide bandgap (WBG) polymer donors, thus significantly improving the short current density (J sc ) and PCEs. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] However, its further improvement still remains a formidable challenge due to the almost saturated design toolbox of building blocks for brand new donor/acceptor materials and the insufficient light absorption coverage by binary blends. [27] To make the most of the vast existing pool of semiconductors with various bandgaps and overcome the absorption limitations, tandem devices and ternary blend devices were developed. Tandem OSCs improve the light absorption ability by vertical stacking multiple single-junction cells with complementary absorption. [28] By harvesting both high and low energy photons in the separated subcells, tandem OSCs are able to diminish thermalization loss of photonic energy and overcome the Shockley-Queisser (S-Q) limit. [29] The rapid progress in NFAs has boosted the PCE of tandem OSCs approaching 20%. [14] However, the fabrication of tandem OSCs involves complicated multilayer deposition with serious technical challenges, which may limit their industrialization prospect. Alternatively, the ternary blend organic solar cells (TB-OSCs) strike a good balance between light-harvesting enhancement and device fabrication simplicity by directly Ternary blend organic solar cells (TB-OSCs) incorporating multiple donor and/or acceptor materials into the active layer have emerged as a promising strategy to simultaneously improve the overall device parameters for realizing higher performances than binary devices. Whereas introducing multiple materials also results in a more complicated morphology than their binary blend counterparts. Understanding the morphology is crucially im...

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Section: Predicting the Miscibility Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ternary Blend Organic Solar Cells: Understanding the Morphology from Recent Progress

2022

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“…Here, the OSCs based on the asymmetric NFAs (Y-FIC-γe- and Y-ClIC-γe) have higher thermal stability than that based on the symmetric Y-IC-γe; that is, PCE retentions of over 83 and 84% were observed for Y-FIC-γe- and Y-ClIC-γe-based OSCs, respectively, whereas only 62% was observed for Y-IC-γe after thermal treatment for 456 h. In addition, the Y6-based control OSC exhibited a substantial reduction in thermal stability under the same conditions (see Figure S11 and Table S10). These results imply that the asymmetric molecular skeleton has an additional, positive effect on the device’s thermal stability, which may be due to the strong local dipole moments occurring directionally at end-capping regions (see the DFT data above). , …”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

γ-Ester-Functionalized 1,1-Dicyanomethylene-3-indanone End-Capped Nonfullerene Acceptors for High-Performance, Annealing-Free Organic Solar Cells

Lee

Park

Jeong

et al. 2022

ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces

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Modifying the end-capping groups in nonfullerene acceptors (NFAs) is an effective strategy for modulating their properties and that of the entire NFAs. This study reports the synthesis of a novel γ-ester-functionalized IC end-capping group (IC-γe) and its incorporation into the benzothiadiazole-fused central core, yielding isomer-free IC-γe end-capped NFAs, such as Y-IC-γe, Y-FIC-γe, and Y-ClIC-γe. The resultant NFAs exhibited similar absorption profiles but upshifted the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy level compared with those of the ester-free analogues, such as Y6 and Y7. Without thermal annealing, an excellent power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 16.4% is realized in the annealing-free OSC based on Y-FIC-γe with the PM6 donor polymer, which outperforms the OSCs based on Y-IC-γe and Y-ClIC-γe. In addition, the OSCs based on asymmetric Y-FIC-γe and Y-ClIC-γe have higher thermal stability with more than 83% PCE retention at an elevated temperature after 456 h than the symmetric Y-IC-γe case. In this study, we not only establish the structure–property relationship regarding the ester functionality and symmetricity tuning on the NFAs but also diagnose the reasons for the best-performing Y-FIC-γe-based OSCs, providing useful information for a novel high-performing NFA design strategy.

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“…Some reports also show that the incorporation of a third component can improve the stability of organic solar cells. [65][66][67] Harald Ade et al proposed a design rule for rational strategy to suppress device degradation driven by thermodynamics: the ideal third component needs to have miscibility in the donor polymer at or above the percolation threshold, yet also needs to be partly miscible with the crystallizable acceptor. 68 PC 71 BM has miscibility above the percolation threshold in PM6, 69 and the Flory-Huggins interaction parameter c indicates that PC 71 BM is miscible with the host acceptor Y6, thus adding a small amount of PC 71 BM into the PM6/Y6 system can prevent the overaggregation and crystallization of Y6, 70 reduce the degradation of the devices, and improve the storage stability of pseudobilayer ternary OSCs.…”

Section: Stabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

High-performance pseudo-bilayer ternary organic solar cells with PC₇₁BM as the third component

et al. 2022

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Ternary organic solar cells with improved efficiency and stability enabled by compatible dual-acceptor strategy

Cited by 21 publications

References 49 publications

Ternary Blend Organic Solar Cells: Understanding the Morphology from Recent Progress

Ternary Blend Organic Solar Cells: Understanding the Morphology from Recent Progress

γ-Ester-Functionalized 1,1-Dicyanomethylene-3-indanone End-Capped Nonfullerene Acceptors for High-Performance, Annealing-Free Organic Solar Cells

High-performance pseudo-bilayer ternary organic solar cells with PC₇₁BM as the third component

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Ternary organic solar cells with improved efficiency and stability enabled by compatible dual-acceptor strategy

Cited by 21 publications

References 49 publications

Ternary Blend Organic Solar Cells: Understanding the Morphology from Recent Progress

Ternary Blend Organic Solar Cells: Understanding the Morphology from Recent Progress

γ-Ester-Functionalized 1,1-Dicyanomethylene-3-indanone End-Capped Nonfullerene Acceptors for High-Performance, Annealing-Free Organic Solar Cells

High-performance pseudo-bilayer ternary organic solar cells with PC71BM as the third component

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Product

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High-performance pseudo-bilayer ternary organic solar cells with PC₇₁BM as the third component