High-efficiency and air-stable P3HT-based polymer solar cells with a new non-fullerene acceptor.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 27279376.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms11585 and PMC identifier 4906164.
- 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
Solution-processed organic photovoltaics (OPV) offer the attractive prospect of low-cost, light-weight and environmentally benign solar energy production. The highest efficiency OPV at present use low-bandgap donor polymers, many of which suffer from problems with stability and synthetic scalability. They also rely on fullerene-based acceptors, which themselves have issues with cost, stability and limited spectral absorption. Here we present a new non-fullerene acceptor that has been specifically designed to give improved performance alongside the wide bandgap donor poly(3-hexylthiophene), a polymer with significantly better prospects for commercial OPV due to its relative scalability and stability. Thanks to the well-matched optoelectronic and morphological properties of these materials, efficiencies of 6.4% are achieved which is the highest reported for fullerene-free P3HT devices. In addition, dramatically improved air stability is demonstrated relative to other high-efficiency OPV, showing the excellent potential of this new material combination for future technological applications.