U-Shaped Dimeric Acceptors for Balancing Efficiency and Stability in Organic Solar Cells

Pengfei Ding; Zhenyu Chen; Daobin Yang; Xueliang Yu; Jingyu Shi; Yiyu Chen; Jintao Zhu; Jie Wu; Xinyue Cao; Lin Xie; Fei Chen; Ziyi Ge

doi:10.1002/adma.202414080

U-Shaped Dimeric Acceptors for Balancing Efficiency and Stability in Organic Solar Cells

Adv Mater. 2024 Nov 27:e2414080. doi: 10.1002/adma.202414080. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Pengfei Ding^{1

2}, Zhenyu Chen^{1

2}, Daobin Yang^{1

2}, Xueliang Yu¹, Jingyu Shi^{1

2}, Yiyu Chen³, Jintao Zhu⁴, Jie Wu¹, Xinyue Cao¹, Lin Xie^{1

2}, Fei Chen⁴, Ziyi Ge^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Zhejiang Engineering Research Center for Energy Optoelectronic Materials and Devices, Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ningbo, 315201, China.
² Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
³ Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory of Electrical Insulation and Power Equipment, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, 710054, China.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Flexible Electronics of Zhejiang Province, Ningbo Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University, Ningbo, 315100, China.

PMID: 39604321
DOI: 10.1002/adma.202414080

Abstract

Despite significant improvements in power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of organic solar cells (OSCs), achieving excellent stability remains a great challenge to their commercial feasibility. Here, U-shaped dimeric acceptors (5-IDT and 6-IDT) with different molecular lengths are introduced into the binary OSCs as a third component, respectively. The introduction of the third component effectively reduces the energetic disorder and non-radiative voltage losses and improves the exciton dissociation and charge transport of the devices. Consequently, the PCEs of the 6-IDT- and 5-IDT-treated OSCs are significantly improved to 19.32% and 19.96%, respectively, which is the highest PCE for oligomeric acceptors-based ternary OSCs to date. Meanwhile, the thermal stability of the treated devices is dramatically improved, with the initial efficiency retention of the 6-IDT- and 5-IDT-treated devices increasing from 18% to 32% and 75%, respectively, after 1000 h of thermal stress. This is mainly attributed to the ability of the smaller molecular length of 5-IDT to stabilize the phase-separated morphology of the polymeric donor and small molecular acceptor, rather than the high glass transition temperature and low diffusion coefficient.

Keywords: acceptor; dimer; efficiency and stability; molecular conformation; organic solar cells.

Abstract

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