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Reduced energetic disorder enables over 14% efficiency in organic solar cells based on completely non-fused-ring donors and acceptors

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Abstract

The large energetic disorder has been regarded as a limitation for the further advance of organic solar cells (OSCs). The intramolecular energetic disorder, which originates from the molecular conformational diversity, is quite different for various non-fused-ring materials and of great importance for the corresponding device performance. In this work, the 2-ethylhexyl on A4T-16, an efficient completely non-fused-ring acceptor, is replaced with the 3-ethylheptyl to obtain a novel acceptor of A4T-3. The out-shifted branching position of 3-ethylheptyl reduces the steric hindrance effect, endowing A4T-3 with a more coplanar structure. As a result, A4T-3 exhibits a lower intramolecular energetic disorder than A4T-16, leading to a more uniform surface-electrostatic potential (ESP) distribution. Therefore, A4T-3 exhibits a smaller barrier for intramolecular electron transport and a higher electron mobility. Meanwhile, the lower ESP endows A4T-3 with reduced non-radiative energy loss when blending with the donor. When using PTVT-T as the donor, the A4T-3-based OSC exhibited comprehensively improved photovoltaic properties in comparison with the A4T-16-based one, delivering a high power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 14.26%. Notably, this is the first report of OSCs where both the donor and the acceptor are completely non-fused-ring materials. According to the material-only cost (MOC) evaluation, the cost of PTVT-T:A4T-3-based device is much lower than that of other high-performance OSCs, revealing the great potential of completely non-fused-ring photoactive materials for application-oriented OSCs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFE0116700), the Basic and Applied Basic Research Major Program of Guangdong Province (2019B030302007), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21835006 and 22075017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemistry and Biology Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

    Chenyi Yang, Jianhui Hou & Shaoqing Zhang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Chenyi Yang, Lijiao Ma, Ye Xu, Junzhen Ren, Jianhui Hou & Shaoqing Zhang

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  1. Chenyi Yang
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Correspondence to Shaoqing Zhang.

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Supporting information The supporting information is available online at https://chem.scichina.com and https://link.springer.com/journal/11426. The supporting materials are published as submitted, without typesetting or editing. The responsibility for scientific accuracy and content remains entirely with the authors.

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Reduced energetic disorder enables over 14% efficiency in organic solar cells based on completely non-fused-ring donors and acceptors

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Yang, C., Ma, L., Xu, Y. et al. Reduced energetic disorder enables over 14% efficiency in organic solar cells based on completely non-fused-ring donors and acceptors. Sci. China Chem. 65, 2604–2612 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-022-1449-4

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