High-Performance and Stable All-Polymer Solar Cells Using Donor and Acceptor Polymers with Complementary Absorption

Journal article, 2017

To explore the advantages of emerging all-polymer solar cells (all-PSCs), growing efforts have been devoted to developing matched donor and acceptor polymers to outperform fullerene-based PSCs. In this work, a detailed characterization and comparison of all-PSCs using a set of donor and acceptor polymers with both conventional and inverted device structures is performed. A simple method to quantify the actual composition and light harvesting contributions from the individual donor and acceptor is described. Detailed study on the exciton dissociation and charge recombination is carried out by a set of measurements to understand the photocurrent loss. It is unraveled that fine-tuned crystallinity of the acceptor, matched donor and acceptor with complementary absorption and desired energy levels, and device architecture engineering can synergistically boost the performance of all-PSCs. As expected, the PBDTTS-FTAZ:PNDI-T10 all-PSC attains a high and stable power conversion efficiency of 6.9% without obvious efficiency decay in 60 d. This work demonstrates that PNDI-T10 can be a potential alternative acceptor polymer to the widely used acceptor N2200 for high-performance and stable all-PSCs.