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Optimized mixed phases to achieve improved performance of organic solar cells

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2019

Yanlin Yi
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun130022, China State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals, School of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Panjin, Liaoning124221, China
Xu Gao
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun130022, China
Jian Yuan
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China
Jiangang Liu
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun130022, China
Wei Ma
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China
Yanchun Han*
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun130022, China
*
Address all correspondence to Yanchun Han at ychan@ciac.ac.cn
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Abstract

In the three-phase (pure donor, pure acceptor, and mixed phases) morphologies of organic solar cells, the mixed phases produce an energy cascade that promotes the generation of free carriers. However, how to optimize the content of the mixed phases is a challenging problem. The authors proposed to control different content of mixed phases in DRTB-T and IDIC blends by additive and solvent vapor annealing (SVA). The authors first formed the largest extent amount of mixed phases by the additive cinene (2%) to inhibit the crystallization of DRTB-T and IDIC. And then, different amounts of mixed phases were achieved by further SVA for different times (from 0 to 50 s) to increase the content of pure DRTB-T and IDIC phases. The energetic offsets (ΔE) of pure and mixed phases gradually decrease from 0.529 to 0.477 eV for different content of mixed phases. When ΔE was 0.498 eV, the highest photocurrent density (Jsc) was obtained. The power conversion efficiency was increased from 3.23% (without any treatment) to 8.54%. Therefore, the authors demonstrated that the optimized content of the mixed phases is critical to device performance.

Type
Research Letters
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 2019

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