Ternary nonfullerene all-small-molecule organic solar cells (NFSM-OSCs) were developed by incorporating a nonfullerene acceptor (IDIC) and two structurally similar small molecular donors (SM and SM-Cl), where SM-Cl is a novel small molecular donor derived from the reported molecular donor SM. When doping 10% SM-Cl in the SM:IDIC binary system, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the ternary solar cell was dramatically increased from 9.39 to 10.29%. Characterization studies indicated that the two donors tend to form an alloy state, which effectively down-shifted the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) energy level of the donor, thus promoting a higher open-circuit voltage. Interestingly, incorporating a third component (SM-Cl) with a lower crystallinity was proven to facilitate the demixing between donors and acceptors, which was contrary to the traditional findings of enhanced phase separation through the incorporation of highly crystalline molecule. Although the morphological modulation has always been a bottleneck issue in NFSM-OSCs, the findings in this work indicated that the modulation on crystallinity deviation between donors and acceptors could be an effective method to further improve the performance of NFSM-OSCs, providing a new perspective on NFSM-OSCs.
Keywords: alloy model; chlorinated molecular donor; crystallinity modulation; nonfullerene all-small-molecule solar cells; ternary strategy.