High-efficiency and air-stable P3HT-based polymer solar cells with a new non-fullerene acceptor

Sarah Holliday, Raja Shahid Ashraf, Andrew Wadsworth, Derya Baran, Syeda Amber Yousaf, Christian B. Nielsen, Ching-Hong Tan, Stoichko D. Dimitrov, Zhengrong Shang, Nicola Gasparini, Maha A Alamoudi, Frédéric Laquai, Christoph J. Brabec, Alberto Salleo, James R. Durrant, Iain McCulloch

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1068 Scopus citations

Abstract

Solution-processed organic photovoltaics (OPV) offer the attractive prospect of low-cost, light-weight and environmentally benign solar energy production. The highest efficiency OPV at present use low-bandgap donor polymers, many of which suffer from problems with stability and synthetic scalability. They also rely on fullerene-based acceptors, which themselves have issues with cost, stability and limited spectral absorption. Here we present a new non-fullerene acceptor that has been specifically designed to give improved performance alongside the wide bandgap donor poly(3-hexylthiophene), a polymer with significantly better prospects for commercial OPV due to its relative scalability and stability. Thanks to the well-matched optoelectronic and morphological properties of these materials, efficiencies of 6.4% are achieved which is the highest reported for fullerene-free P3HT devices. In addition, dramatically improved air stability is demonstrated relative to other high-efficiency OPV, showing the excellent potential of this new material combination for future technological applications.
Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalNature Communications
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 9 2016

Bibliographical note

KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01
Acknowledgements: We thank BASF for partial financial support, as well as EPSRC Projects EP/G037515/1 and EP/M023532/1, EC FP7 Project SC2 (610115), EC FP7 Project ArtESun (604397), EC FP7 Project POLYMED (612538), Project Synthetic carbon allotropes project SFB 953 and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). George Richardson is gratefully acknowledged for his assistance with optical microscopy. M.A. thanks Z. Kan and Y. Firdaus for helpful discussions.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'High-efficiency and air-stable P3HT-based polymer solar cells with a new non-fullerene acceptor'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this