High-performance all-polymer solar cells enabled by a novel low bandgap non-fully conjugated polymer acceptor
Journal article, 2021
Anon-fully conjugated polymer as a new class of acceptor materials has shown some advantages over its small molecular counterpart when used in photoactive layers for all-polymer solar cells (all-PSCs), despite a low power conversion efficiency (PCE) caused by its narrow absorption spectra. Herein, a novel non-fully conjugated polymer acceptor PFY-2TS with a low bandgap of similar to 1.40 eV was developed, via polymerizing a large pi-fused small molecule acceptor (SMA) building block (namely YBO) with a non-conjugated thioalkyl linkage. Compared with its precursor YBO, PFY-2TS retains a similar low bandgap but a higher LUMO level. Moreover, compared with the structural analog of YBO-based fully conjugated polymer acceptor PFY-DTC, PFY-2TS shows similar absorption spectrum and electron mobility, but significantly different molecular crystallinity and aggregation properties, which results in optimal blend morphology with a polymer donor PBDB-T and better device physical processes in all-PSCs. As a result, PFY-2TS-based all-PSCs achieved a PCE of 12.31% with a small energy loss of 0.56 eV enabled by the reduced non-radiative energy loss (0.24 eV), which is better than that of 11.08% for the PFY-DTC-based ones. Our work clearly demonstrated that non-fully conjugated polymers as a new class of acceptor materials are very promising for the development of high-performance all-PSCs.
power conversion efficiency
non-fully conjugated polymer acceptors
all-polymer solar cells
morphology
energy loss
Author
Qunping Fan
Chalmers, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Applied Chemistry
Ruijie Ma
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Tao Liu
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Jianwei Yu
Linköping University
Yiqun Xiao
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Wenyan Su
Chalmers, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Applied Chemistry
Jinan University
Karlstad University
Yuxiang Li
Xi'an University of Science and Technology
Wenhong Peng
Jinan University
Chalmers, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Applied Chemistry
Tao Guo
Chalmers, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Applied Chemistry
Zhenghui Luo
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Huiliang Sun
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Lintao Hou
Jinan University
Weiguo Zhu
Changzhou University
Xinhui Lu
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Feng Gao
Linköping University
Ellen Moons
Karlstad University
Donghong Yu
Aalborg University
Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research Denmark
He Yan
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Ergang Wang
Chalmers, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Applied Chemistry
Science China Chemistry
1674-7291 (ISSN) 18691870 (eISSN)
Vol. 64 8 1380-1388Subject Categories
Polymer Chemistry
Textile, Rubber and Polymeric Materials
Materials Chemistry
DOI
10.1007/s11426-021-1020-7