Flexible, highly efficient all-polymer solar cells.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 26449658.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms9547 and PMC identifier 4633811.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
All-polymer solar cells have shown great potential as flexible and portable power generators. These devices should offer good mechanical endurance with high power-conversion efficiency for viability in commercial applications. In this work, we develop highly efficient and mechanically robust all-polymer solar cells that are based on the PBDTTTPD polymer donor and the P(NDI2HD-T) polymer acceptor. These systems exhibit high power-conversion efficiency of 6.64%. Also, the proposed all-polymer solar cells have even better performance than the control polymer-fullerene devices with phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) as the electron acceptor (6.12%). More importantly, our all-polymer solar cells exhibit dramatically enhanced strength and flexibility compared with polymer/PCBM devices, with 60- and 470-fold improvements in elongation at break and toughness, respectively. The superior mechanical properties of all-polymer solar cells afford greater tolerance to severe deformations than conventional polymer-fullerene solar cells, making them much better candidates for applications in flexible and portable devices.