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The enormous synthetic efforts on novel solar cell materials require a reliable and fast technique for the rapid screening of novel donor/acceptor combinations in order to quickly and reliably estimate their optimized parameters. Here, we report the applicability of such a versatile and fast evaluation technique for bulk heterojunction (BHJ) organic photovoltaics (OPV) by utilizing a steady-state photoluminescence (PL) method confirmed by electroluminescence (EL) measurements. A strong relation has been observed between the residual singlet emission and the charge transfer state emission in the blend. Using this relation, a figure of merit (FOM) is defined from photoluminescence and also electroluminescence measurements for qualitative analysis and shown to precisely anticipate the optimized blend parameters of bulk heterojunction films. Photoluminescence allows contactless evaluation of the photoactive layer and can be used to predict the optimized conditions for the best polymer–fullerene combination. Most interestingly, the contactless, PL-based FOM method has the potential to be integrated as a fast and reliable inline tool for quality control and material optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel fused heterocycle-flanked diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP) monomer, thieno[2,3-b]pyridine diketopyrrolopyrrole (TPDPP), was designed and synthesized. When copolymerized with 3,4-difluorothiophene using Stille coupling polymerization, the new polymer pTPDPP-TF possesses a highly planar conjugated polymer backbone due to the fused thieno[2,3-b]pyridine flanking unit that effectively alleviates the steric hindrance with both the central DPP core and the 3,4-difluorothiophene repeat unit. This new polymer exhibits a high electron affinity (EA) of -4.1 eV and was successfully utilized as an n-type polymer semiconductor for applications in organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) and all polymer solar cells. A promising n-type charge carrier mobility of 0.1 cm2 V-1 s-1 was obtained in bottom-contact, top-gate OFETs, and a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 2.72% with a high open-circuit voltage (VOC) of 1.04 V was achieved for all polymer solar cells using PTB7-Th as the polymer donor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]