Rigidifying Nonplanar Perylene Diimides by Ring Fusion Toward Geometry-Tunable Acceptors for High-Performance Fullerene-Free Solar Cells

Hongliang Zhong; Chen-Hao Wu; Chang-Zhi Li; Joshua Carpenter; Chu-Chen Chueh; Jung-Yao Chen; Harald Ade; Alex K-Y Jen

doi:10.1002/adma.201504120

Rigidifying Nonplanar Perylene Diimides by Ring Fusion Toward Geometry-Tunable Acceptors for High-Performance Fullerene-Free Solar Cells

Adv Mater. 2016 Feb 3;28(5):951-8. doi: 10.1002/adma.201504120. Epub 2015 Dec 7.

Authors

Hongliang Zhong¹, Chen-Hao Wu¹, Chang-Zhi Li¹, Joshua Carpenter², Chu-Chen Chueh¹, Jung-Yao Chen¹, Harald Ade², Alex K-Y Jen¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA.
² Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA.

PMID: 26638861
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201504120

Abstract

Rigid fused perylene diimide (PDI) dimers bridged with heterocycles exhibit superior photovoltaic performance compared to their unfused semiflexible analogues. Changing the chalcogen atoms in the aromatic bridges gradually increases the twist angles between the two PDI planes, leading to a varied morphology in which the one bridged by thiophene achieves a balance and shows the best efficiency of 6.72%.

Keywords: fused rings; nonfullerene acceptors; organic photovoltaics; perylene diimides; power conversion efficiency.