Geometry design of tethered small-molecule acceptor enables highly stable and efficient polymer solar cells

Yang Bai; Ze Zhang; Qiuju Zhou; Hua Geng; Qi Chen; Seoyoung Kim; Rui Zhang; Cen Zhang; Bowen Chang; Shangyu Li; Hongyuan Fu; Lingwei Xue; Haiqiao Wang; Wenbin Li; Weihua Chen; Mengyuan Gao; Long Ye; Yuanyuan Zhou; Yanni Ouyang; Chunfeng Zhang; Feng Gao; Changduk Yang; Yongfang Li; Zhi-Guo Zhang

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38673-5

Geometry design of tethered small-molecule acceptor enables highly stable and efficient polymer solar cells

Nat Commun. 2023 May 22;14(1):2926. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-38673-5.

Authors

Yang Bai^#¹, Ze Zhang^#¹, Qiuju Zhou², Hua Geng³, Qi Chen¹, Seoyoung Kim⁴, Rui Zhang⁵, Cen Zhang¹, Bowen Chang¹, Shangyu Li¹, Hongyuan Fu¹, Lingwei Xue¹, Haiqiao Wang⁶, Wenbin Li⁷, Weihua Chen⁷, Mengyuan Gao⁸, Long Ye⁸, Yuanyuan Zhou⁹, Yanni Ouyang⁹, Chunfeng Zhang¹⁰, Feng Gao⁵, Changduk Yang⁴, Yongfang Li¹¹, Zhi-Guo Zhang¹²

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Chemical Resource Engineering, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, 100029, China.
² Analysis & Testing Center, Xinyang Normal University, Xinyang, Henan, 464000, China.
³ Beijing Key Laboratory for Optical Materials and Photonic Devices, Department of Chemistry, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100048, China.
⁴ Department of Energy Engineering, School of Energy and Chemical Engineering, Low Dimensional Carbon Materials Center, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, 689-798, South Korea.
⁵ Department of Physics, Biomolecular and Organic Electronics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM), Linköping University, Linköping, SE-58183, Sweden.
⁶ Beijing Engineering Research Center for the Synthesis and Applications of Waterborne Polymers, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, 100029, China.
⁷ College of Chemistry & Green Catalysis Center, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, 450001, China.
⁸ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Composite and Functional Materials, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300350, China.
⁹ Department of Physics, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China, Smart Society Lab, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China.
¹⁰ National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Physics, and Collaborative Innovation Center for Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China.
¹¹ Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.
¹² State Key Laboratory of Chemical Resource Engineering, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, 100029, China. zgzhangwhu@iccas.ac.cn.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

With the power conversion efficiency of binary polymer solar cells dramatically improved, the thermal stability of the small-molecule acceptors raised the main concerns on the device operating stability. Here, to address this issue, thiophene-dicarboxylate spacer tethered small-molecule acceptors are designed, and their molecular geometries are further regulated via the thiophene-core isomerism engineering, affording dimeric TDY-α with a 2, 5-substitution and TDY-β with 3, 4-substitution on the core. It shows that TDY-α processes a higher glass transition temperature, better crystallinity relative to its individual small-molecule acceptor segment and isomeric counterpart of TDY-β, and a more stable morphology with the polymer donor. As a result, the TDY-α based device delivers a higher device efficiency of 18.1%, and most important, achieves an extrapolated lifetime of about 35000 hours that retaining 80% of their initial efficiency. Our result suggests that with proper geometry design, the tethered small-molecule acceptors can achieve both high device efficiency and operating stability.

Abstract

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