Highly Efficient and Air Stable Ternary Organic Solar Cell Enabled By Employing a Perylenediimide-Based Acceptor

Abstract

Organic solar cells (OSCs) are regarded as one of the promising photovoltaic technologies to address the issues of energy crisis and environmental pollution all over the world, and are thus considered as the next generation of solar cells. 1 However, the devices power conversation efficiency and stability of the devices are still important factors to limit the commercial application of OSCs. 2 To this end, enhancement of photon absorption is an attractive strategy for the increase of PCE. Recently, developing the ternary OSCs with three materials of complementary absorption spectra is an efficient method to enhance the photon harvesting of single junction devices while having a fairly simple fabrication process. Meanwhile, the morphology of active layers can be finely optimized by selecting the third component and adjusting its contents to improve performance of ternary OSCs. 3 Herein, we synthesized highly air-stable perylenediimide (PDI)-based non-fullerene material and integrated it into common organic solar cells as the third component to form the ternary OSCs. This cascade band structure showed a better energy level alignment and the complimentary absorption, thus demonstrating a high ternary device efficiency of 8.71% that represented 14.6% enhancement with respect to the corresponding binary OSCs. Besides, morphology was characterized by two-dimensional grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction (2D-GIXRD) and photo-induced force microscopy (PiFM) and results suggest improved compatibility between organic materials in OSCs, which could reduce the electronic trap states to inhibit the charge recombination and increase the stability of devices. The ternary OSCs thus exhibited good air stability, photo-stability and humidity. Our work provides a very promising approach to enhance the photovoltaic performance while demonstrating highly stable devices, which could contribute to the future development of the large area manufacturing in an ambient condition and roll-to roll processing on flexible substrates. Reference 1. Yu T., Xu X. P., Zhang G. J., Wan J. H., Li Y., Peng Q., advanced functional materials, 2017, 1701491.2. Li P. D., Mainville M., Zhang Y. L., leclerc M., Sun B. Q., Izquierdo R., Ma D. L., small, 2019, 1804671.3. An Q. S., Zhang F. J., Gao w., Sun Q. Q., Zhang M., Yang C. L., Zhang J., nano energy, 2018, 45, 177-183.