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Non-fullerene acceptor pre-aggregates enable high efficiency pseudo-bulk heterojunction organic solar cells

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Abstract

Pseudo-bulk heterojunction (BHJ) fabricated by sequential casting of donor and acceptor layers has been recently demonstrated a superior structure to prepare organic solar cells (OSCs) with enhanced efficiency compared to the conventional BHJ OSCs cast from a common solution of donor and acceptor. However, molecular diffusion and aggregation within the pseudo-BHJ layer bring great challenges to fully realize the advantage of pseudo-BHJ structure. Herein, a solution-incubated pre-aggregation strategy is employed to tune the nanoscale aggregates of non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) BTP-eC11 and N3 to substantially enhance device power-conversion efficiency (PCE). NFA pre-aggregates are incubated in solutions via aging or adding anti-solvent, and then sequentially cast onto D18 fibrillar network, which then penetrate to form a pseudo-BHJ structure with appropriate domain sizes to ensure superior charge mobilities. While the conventional pseudo-BHJ OSCs obtain inferior PCEs below 17% compared with normal BHJ OSCs, NFA pre-aggregates help to achieve remarkable PCEs of 17.7% and 17.5% for D18/BTP-eC11 and D18/N3 pseudo-BHJ OSCs. This work demonstrates that the solution-incubated nanoscale pre-aggregation is an efficient approach to regulate molecular diffusion and aggregation to guarantee high performance pseudo-BHJ OSCs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52073221, 21774097) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WUT: 2021III016JC, 2020-YB-004) of China. We thank beamline BL14B1 and BL16B1 at Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (China) for providing beam times to perform GIWAXS and GISAXS measurements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China

    Donghui Li, Chuanhang Guo, Xue Zhang, Baocai Du, Cong Yu, Pang Wang, Shili Cheng, Liang Wang, Jinlong Cai, Hui Wang, Dan Liu & Tao Wang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Research/Education Center for Excellence in Molecular Sciences, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Huifeng Yao & Jianhui Hou

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Huifeng Yao & Jianhui Hou

  4. School of Chemistry, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Yanming Sun

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  1. Donghui Li
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Correspondence to Jianhui Hou or Tao Wang.

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Li, D., Guo, C., Zhang, X. et al. Non-fullerene acceptor pre-aggregates enable high efficiency pseudo-bulk heterojunction organic solar cells. Sci. China Chem. 65, 373–381 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-021-1128-1

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