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High-efficiency organic solar cells processed from a halogen-free solvent system

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Abstract

The use of non-halogenated solvents for the green manufacture of high-efficiency organic solar cells (OSCs) is important for their future application. However, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the non-halogenated solvent processed OSCs is generally lower than their halogenated counterpart due to the poor film microstructure caused by the solubility issue. Herein, we propose a halogen-free solvent system to optimize film microstructure of the photovoltaic blend based on the polymer donor D18 and small-molecule acceptor (SMA) L8-BO towards high-efficiency OSCs. The solvent system is consisted of a main solvent carbon disulfide and an additive paraxylene, where the former ensures the good solution-processability and promotes the solution aggregation of L8-BO, and the latter can finely control the phase-separation process by selectively dissolving the SMA. This solvent combination robustly produces a high-quality active layer, i.e., the bicontinuous networks of donor and acceptor with nano-sized phase-separation and strong π−π stacking. With the effective charge generation, transport and collection, the resulting device from the non-halogenated solvent system shows a high PCE of 17.50%, which is comparable to that of the device prepared from the halogenated solvent chloroform (ca. 17.11%). This article proposes a new strategy for the green fabrication of high-efficiency OSCs to accelerate their industrialization.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51873204, 51933010, 51773046), the 111 Project (B21005), the National 1000-Talent-Plan Program (1110010341), the Science and Technology Program of Shaanxi Province (2021KJXX-13), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK202103104). R. Zhang thanks Prof. Chenhui Zhu for the GIWAXS measurement at beamline 7.3.3 at the Advanced Light Source, LBNL, which is supposed by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the US Department of Energy (DE-AC02-05CH11231).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Applied Surface and Colloid Chemistry, Ministry of Education, Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Advanced Energy Devices, Shaanxi Engineering Lab for Advanced Energy Technology, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, 710119, China

    Yueling Su, Zicheng Ding, Weibing Tang, Wenliang Huang, Zhichao Wang, Kui Zhao, Xiaochen Wang, Shengzhong (Frank) Liu & Yongfang Li

  2. Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Rui Zhang

  3. Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy, iChEM, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian, 116023, China

    Shengzhong (Frank) Liu

  4. Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Yongfang Li

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  1. Yueling Su
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  2. Zicheng Ding
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Correspondence to Zicheng Ding, Xiaochen Wang or Shengzhong (Frank) Liu.

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Su, Y., Ding, Z., Zhang, R. et al. High-efficiency organic solar cells processed from a halogen-free solvent system. Sci. China Chem. 66, 2380–2388 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-023-1608-6

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