Jiaming Huang

Abstract Ternary heterojunction strategies appear to be an efficient approach to improve the efficiency of organic solar cells (OSCs) through harvesting more sunlight. Ternary OSCs are fabricated by employing wide bandgap polymer donor (PM6), narrow bandgap nonfullerene acceptor (Y6), and PC 71 BM as the third component to tune the light absorption and morphologies of the blend films. A record power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 16.67% (certified as 16.0%) on rigid substrate is achieved in an optimized PM6:Y6:PC 71 BM blend ratio of 1:1:0.2. The introduction of PC 71 BM endows the blend with enhanced absorption in the range of 300–500 nm and optimises interpenetrating morphologies to promote photogenerated charge dissociation and extraction. More importantly, a PCE of 14.06% for flexible ITO‐free ternary OSCs is obtained based on this ternary heterojunction system, which is the highest PCE reported for flexible state‐of‐the‐art OSCs. A very promising ternary heterojunction strategy to develop highly efficient rigid and flexible OSCs is presented.

Herein, a facile and effective strategy is demonstrated to unleash the full potential of existing photoactive materials.

Graded bulk-heterojunction (G-BHJ) with well-defined vertical phase separation has potential to surpass classical BHJ in organic solar cells (OSCs). In this work, an effective G-BHJ strategy via nonhalogenated solvent sequential deposition is demonstrated using nonfullerene acceptor (NFA) OSCs. Spin-coated G-BHJ OSCs deliver an outstanding 17.48% power conversion efficiency (PCE). Depth-profiling X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (DP-XPS) and angle-dependent grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GI-XRD) techniques enable the visualization of polymer/NFA composition and crystallinity gradient distributions, which benefit charge transport, and enable outstanding thick OSC PCEs (16.25% for 300 nm, 14.37% for 500 nm), which are among the highest reported. Moreover, the nonhalogenated solvent enabled G-BHJ OSC via open-air blade coating and achieved a record 16.77% PCE. The blade-coated G-BHJ has drastically different D-A crystallization kinetics, which suppresses the excessive aggregation induced unfavorable phase separation in BHJ. All these make G-BHJ a feasible and promising strategy towards highly efficient, eco- and manufacture friendly OSCs.

All-solution-processing at low temperatures is important and desirable for making printed photovoltaic devices and also offers the possibility of a safe and cost-effective fabrication environment for the devices. Herein, an all-solution-processed flexible organic solar cell (OSC) using poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly-(styrenesulfonate) electrodes is reported. The all-solution-processed flexible devices yield the highest power conversion efficiency of 10.12% with high fill factor of over 70%, which is the highest value for metal-oxide-free flexible OSCs reported so far. The enhanced performance is attributed to the newly developed gentle acid treatment at room temperature that enables a high-performance PEDOT:PSS/plastic underlying substrate with a matched work function (≈4.91 eV), and the interface engineering that endows the devices with better interface contacts and improved hole mobility. Furthermore, the flexible devices exhibit an excellent mechanical flexibility, as indicated by a high retention (≈94%) of the initial efficiency after 1000 bending cycles. This work provides a simple route to fabricate high-performance all-solution-processed flexible OSCs, which is important for the development of printing, blading, and roll-to-roll technologies.