A polymer design strategy toward green solvent processed efficient non-fullerene polymer solar cells. Issue 10 (21st February 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Qin, Yunpeng; Ye, Long; Zhang, Shaoqing; Zhu, Jie; Yang, Bei; Ade, Harald; Hou, Jianhui
• Is Part Of: Journal of materials chemistry. Volume 6:Issue 10(2018)
• Page Start: 4324
• Page End: 4330
• Publication Date: 2018-02-21
• Subjects: Materials -- Research -- Periodicals; Chemistry, Analytic -- Periodicals; Environmental sciences -- Research -- Periodicals; 543.0284
• DOI: 10.1039/c8ta00368h
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2050-7488

Abstract

Abstract : This work suggests an effective material design strategy to prepare efficient PSCs with a green solvent, which is important in PSCs. Abstract : So far, the most successful and widely used solvents in polymer solar cells (PSCs) are chlorinated solvents like chloroform (CF), 1, 2-dichlorobenzene (DCB) and chlorobenzene (CB), which are highly detrimental to human health and the environment. In this work, by the approach of manipulating flexible and conjugated side groups of a widely used polymer donor material (PBDB-T), two new polymers named PBDB-T-BO and PBDB-BzT are designed and synthesized to improve the solubility and fine-tune the aggregation property in tetrahydrofuran (THF), a much more benign solvent. As a result, an outstanding PCE of 12.10% was achieved with the THF-processed PBDB-BzT:IT-M device. The result in this work demonstrates the importance to modulate the aggregation effect of the polymer in solution by inserting conjugated groups and also suggests a feasible method to convert the main processing solvent of a highly efficient non-fullerene (NF)-PSC from CB into THF.