A Wide-Bandgap Donor Polymer for Highly Efficient Non-fullerene Organic Solar Cells with a Small Voltage Loss

J Am Chem Soc. 2017 May 10;139(18):6298-6301. doi: 10.1021/jacs.7b01606. Epub 2017 Apr 27.

Abstract

To achieve efficient non-fullerene organic solar cells, it is important to reduce the voltage loss from the optical bandgap to the open-circuit voltage of the cell. Here we report a highly efficient non-fullerene organic solar cell with a high open-circuit voltage of 1.08 V and a small voltage loss of 0.55 V. The high performance was enabled by a novel wide-bandgap (2.05 eV) donor polymer paired with a narrow-bandgap (1.63 eV) small-molecular acceptor (SMA). Our morphology characterizations show that both the polymer and the SMA can maintain high crystallinity in the blend film, resulting in crystalline and small domains. As a result, our non-fullerene organic solar cells realize an efficiency of 11.6%, which is the best performance for a non-fullerene organic solar cell with such a small voltage loss.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.