Achieving 19% efficiency in non-fused ring electron acceptor solar cells via solubility control of donor and acceptor crystallization
Rui Zeng, Ming Zhang, Xiaodong Wang, Lei Zhu, Bonan Hao, Wenkai Zhong, Guanqing Zhou, Jiawei Deng, Senke Tan, Jiaxin Zhuang, Fei Han, Anyang Zhang, Zichun Zhou, Xiaonan Xue, Shengjie Xu, Jinqiu Xu, Yahui Liu, Hao Lu, Xuefei Wu, Cheng Wang, Zachary Fink, Thomas P. Russell, Hao Jing, Yongming Zhang, Zhishan Bo and Feng Liu
Nature Energy (2024)
Non-fused ring electron acceptors (NFREAs) potentially have lower synthetic costs than their fused counterparts. However, the low backbone planarity and the presence of bulky substituents adversely affect the crystallinity of NFREAs, impeding charge transport and the formation of bicontinuous morphology in organic solar cells. Here we show that a binary solvent system can individually control the crystallization and phase separation of the donor polymer (for example, D18) and the NFREA (for example, 2BTh-2F-C2). We select solvents such as chloroform and o-xylene that evaporate at different temperatures and rates and have different solubility for D18. Upon evaporation of chloroform, D18 starts to assemble into fibrils. Then, the evaporation of o-xylene induces the rapid formation of a fibril network that phase segregates 2BTh-2F-C2 into pure domains and leads to a bicontinuous morphology. The well-defined interpenetrating network morphology affords an efficiency of 19.02% on small-area cells and 17.28% on 1 cm2 devices.