Molecular design revitalizes the low-cost PTV-polymer for highly efficient organic solar cells

Junzhen Ren; Pengqing Bi; Jianqi Zhang; Jiao Liu; Jingwen Wang; Ye Xu; Zhixiang Wei; Shaoqing Zhang; Jianhui Hou

doi:10.1093/nsr/nwab031

Molecular design revitalizes the low-cost PTV-polymer for highly efficient organic solar cells

Natl Sci Rev. 2021 Feb 12;8(8):nwab031. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwab031. eCollection 2021 Aug.

Authors

Junzhen Ren¹, Pengqing Bi², Jianqi Zhang³, Jiao Liu¹, Jingwen Wang², Ye Xu², Zhixiang Wei³, Shaoqing Zhang¹, Jianhui Hou¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry and Biological Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
³ CAS Key Laboratory of Nanosystem and Hierarchical Fabrication, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing 100190, China.

Abstract

Developing photovoltaic materials with simple chemical structures and easy synthesis still remains a major challenge in the industrialization process of organic solar cells (OSCs). Herein, an ester substituted poly(thiophene vinylene) derivative, PTVT-T, was designed and synthesized in very few steps by adopting commercially available raw materials. The ester groups on the thiophene units enable PTVT-T to have a planar and stable conformation. Moreover, PTVT-T presents a wide absorption band and strong aggregation effect in solution, which are the key characteristics needed to realize high performance in non-fullerene-acceptor (NFA)-based OSCs. We then prepared OSCs by blending PTVT-T with three representative fullerene- and NF-based acceptors, PC₇₁BM, IT-4F and BTP-eC9. It was found that PTVT-T can work well with all the acceptors, showing great potential to match new emerging NFAs. Particularly, a remarkable power conversion efficiency of 16.20% is achieved in a PTVT-T:BTP-eC9-based device, which is the highest value among the counterparts based on PTV derivatives. This work demonstrates that PTVT-T shows great potential for the future commercialization of OSCs.

Keywords: low-cost; organic solar cell; poly(thienylene vinylene); simple chemical structure.