Rhodanine-based nonfullerene acceptors for organic solar cells

Abstract

Significant progress on the development of non-fullerene acceptors (NFAs) for organic solar cells (OSCs) has been made in the past several years, and the power conversion efficiency (PCE) exceeding 17% has been already realized based on a tandem non-fullerene device. To date, NFAs with a linearly fused acceptor-donor-acceptor (A-D-A) structure are of great interest, due to their attracting synthetic flexibility and high photovoltaic performance. Rhodanine is one of the most studied electron-withdrawing moieties to construct such A-D-A type NFAs, and the resulting single-junction OSCs have produced PCEs of ~10%. More interestingly, those rhodanine-based NFAs have demonstrated a particularly excellent compatibility with well-known P3HT donor, enabling respectable PCEs over 7%. Thus in this review, we summarize the important advances on rhodanine-based NFAs with a main focus on discussing the molecular design strategies, providing a better understanding of the structure-property relationship for those rhodanine-based NFAs.