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Synergistic effect of fluorination on both donor and acceptor materials for high performance non-fullerene polymer solar cells with 13.5% efficiency

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Abstract

A high performance polymer solar cells (PSCs) based on polymer donor PM6 containing fluorinated thienyl benzodithiophene unit and n-type organic semiconductor acceptor IT-4F containing fluorinated end-groups were developed. In addition to complementary absorption spectra (300–830 nm) with IT-4F, the PM6 also has a deep HOMO (the highest occupied molecular) level (−5.50 eV), which will lower the open-circuit voltage (Voc) sacrifice and reduce the Vloss of the IT-4F-based PSCs. Moreover, the strong crystallinity of PM6 is beneficial to form favorable blend morphology and hence to suppress recombination. As a result, in comparison with the PSCs based on a non-fluorinated D/A pair of PBDB-T:ITIC with a medium PCE of 11.2%, the PM6:IT-4Fbased PSCs yielded an impressive PCE of 13.5% due to the synergistic effect of fluorination on both donor and acceptor, which is among the highest values recorded in the literatures for PSCs to date. Furthermore, a PCE of 12.2% was remained with the active layer thickness of up to 285 nm and a high PCE of 11.4% was also obtained with a large device area of 1 cm2. In addition, the devices also showed good storage, thermal and illumination stabilities with respect to the efficiency. These results indicate that fluorination is an effective strategy to improve the photovoltaic performance of materials, as well as the both fluorinated donor and acceptor pair-PM6:IT-4F is an ideal candidate for the large scale roll-to-roll production of efficient PSCs in the future.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51422306, 51503135, 51573120, 91633301), and Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation (BK20150332). T. P. Russell was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (N00014-15-1-2244). Portions of this research were carried out at beamline 7.3.3 and 11.0.1.2 at the Advanced Light Source, Molecular Foundry, and National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which was supported by the DOE, Office of Science, and Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State and Local Joint Engineering Laboratory for Novel Functional Polymeric Materials, Laboratory of Advanced Optoelectronic Materials, College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Qunping Fan, Wenyan Su, Yan Wang, Bing Guo, Xia Guo, Maojie Zhang & Yongfang Li

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Collaborative Innovation Center of IFSA, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Feng Liu

  3. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Yufeng Jiang & Thomas P. Russell

  4. CAS Research/Education Center for Excellence in 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. Qunping Fan
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Correspondence to Maojie Zhang.

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11426_2017_9199_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Synergistic effect of fluorination on both donor and acceptor materials for high performance non-fullerene polymer solar cells with 13.5% efficiency

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Fan, Q., Su, W., Wang, Y. et al. Synergistic effect of fluorination on both donor and acceptor materials for high performance non-fullerene polymer solar cells with 13.5% efficiency. Sci. China Chem. 61, 531–537 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-017-9199-1

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