Structure-property relations of high permittivity cathode interlayer materials toward bulk heterojunction organic solar cells (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Organic photovoltaics (OPV) show strong potential for a number of renewable energy applications because of some specifically appealing features (light weight, flexibility, color, …). Over the past decade, the power conversion efficiencies of organic solar cells have strongly risen to values surpassing the 10% threshold, mainly due to strong efforts in chemical engineering of the photoactive components, architectural device optimization and acquisition of fundamental insights in the underlying device physics. As part of the device optimization, the use of conjugated polyelectrolyte (CPE) interfacial layers has been introduced as a popular and powerful way to boost the inherent I-V characteristics. In the presented work, we applied impedance spectroscopy to probe the dielectric permittivity of a series of polythiophene-based CPE interlayer materials as a means to postulate design rules toward novel generation interfacial layers. The presence of ionic pendant groups grants the formation of a capacitive double layer, boosting the charge extraction and device efficiency. A counteracting effect is that the material’s affinity with respect to the underlying photoactive layer diminishes. To enhance the interlayer-photoactive layer compatibility, copolymer structures containing a certain amount of non-ionic side chains are found to be beneficial.