Aminosilane as a Molecular Linker between the Electron-Transport Layer and Active Layer for Efficient Inverted Polymer Solar Cells

Ping Fu; Xin Guo; Shengyang Wang; Yun Ye; Can Li

doi:10.1021/acsami.7b00745

Aminosilane as a Molecular Linker between the Electron-Transport Layer and Active Layer for Efficient Inverted Polymer Solar Cells

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2017 Apr 19;9(15):13390-13395. doi: 10.1021/acsami.7b00745. Epub 2017 Apr 5.

Authors

Ping Fu¹, Xin Guo¹, Shengyang Wang^{1

2}, Yun Ye^{1

2}, Can Li¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , 457 Zhongshan Road, Dalian 116023, China.
² Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beijing 100049, China.

PMID: 28332393
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b00745

Abstract

Interfacial modification is crucial for improving the photovoltaic performance. In this work, we present an aminosilane as a molecular linker between the ZnO electron-transport layer and fullerene derivative phenyl-C₇₁-butyric acid methyl ester (PC₇₁BM)-based active layer for efficient inverted polymer solar cells. An enhancement in the power-conversion efficiency (PCE), from 8.47 to 9.46%, was achieved on using PTB7-Th as donors. The aminosilane molecular linker provides dual functionalities for enhanced PCE, including (1) passivating the ZnO surface and decreasing the surface work function of ZnO for energy-level alignment and (2) bonding onto the fullerene derivative PC₇₁BM-based active layer to reduce the interface contact resistance.

Keywords: aminosilane; device performance; interfacial modification; inverted polymer solar cells; molecular linker.