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Highly Efficient and Reproducible Nonfullerene Solar Cells from Hydrocarbon Solvents

Authors :
Sebastian Pont
James R. Durrant
Andrew Wadsworth
Iain McCulloch
Maged Abdelsamie
Maximilian Moser
Mark Little
Derya Baran
Raja Shahid Ashraf
Weimin Zhang
Zeinab Hamid
Aram Amassian
Marios Neophytou
Commission of the European Communities
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Source :
ACS Energy Letters. 2:1494-1500
Publication Year :
2017
Publisher :
American Chemical Society (ACS), 2017.

Abstract

With chlorinated solvents unlikely to be permitted for use in solution-processed organic solar cells in industry, there must be a focus on developing nonchlorinated solvent systems. Here we report high-efficiency devices utilizing a low-bandgap donor polymer (PffBT4T-2DT) and a nonfullerene acceptor (EH-IDTBR) from hydrocarbon solvents and without using additives. When mesitylene was used as the solvent, rather than chlorobenzene, an improved power conversion efficiency (11.1%) was achieved without the need for pre- or post-treatments. Despite altering the processing conditions to environmentally friendly solvents and room-temperature coating, grazing incident X-ray measurements confirmed that active layers processed from hydrocarbon solvents retained the robust nanomorphology obtained with hot-processed chlorinated solvents. The main advantages of hydrocarbon solvent-processed devices, besides the improved efficiencies, were the reproducibility and storage lifetime of devices. Mesitylene devices showed better reproducibility and shelf life up to 4000 h with PCE dropping by only 8% of its initial value.

Details

ISSN :
23808195
Volume :
2
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
ACS Energy Letters
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....0a3c7074913ecb0c950c2eda26398c44
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00390