Medium-Bandgap Small-Molecule Donors Compatible with Both Fullerene and Nonfullerene Acceptors

Yong Huo; Cenqi Yan; Bin Kan; Xiao-Fei Liu; Li-Chuan Chen; Chen-Xia Hu; Tsz-Ki Lau; Xinhui Lu; Chun-Lin Sun; Xiangfeng Shao; Yongsheng Chen; Xiaowei Zhan; Hao-Li Zhang

doi:10.1021/acsami.7b17961

Medium-Bandgap Small-Molecule Donors Compatible with Both Fullerene and Nonfullerene Acceptors

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2018 Mar 21;10(11):9587-9594. doi: 10.1021/acsami.7b17961. Epub 2018 Mar 6.

Authors

Yong Huo¹, Cenqi Yan², Bin Kan³, Xiao-Fei Liu¹, Li-Chuan Chen¹, Chen-Xia Hu¹, Tsz-Ki Lau⁴, Xinhui Lu⁴, Chun-Lin Sun¹, Xiangfeng Shao¹, Yongsheng Chen³, Xiaowei Zhan², Hao-Li Zhang^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Applied Organic Chemistry, Key Laboratory of Special Function Materials and Structure Design, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering , Lanzhou University , Lanzhou 730000 , China.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Key Laboratory of Polymer Chemistry and Physics of Ministry of Education , Peking University , Beijing 100871 , China.
³ Key Laboratory of Functional Polymer Materials and the Centre of Nanoscale Science and Technology, Institute of Polymer Chemistry, College of Chemistry , Nankai University , Tianjin 300071 , China.
⁴ Department of Physics , The Chinese University of Hong Kong , New Territories , Hong Kong , China.
⁵ Tianjin Key Laboratory of Molecular Optoelectronic Sciences, Department of Chemistry , Tianjin University, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin) , Tianjin 300072 , P. R. China.

PMID: 29489322
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b17961

Abstract

Much effort has been devoted to the development of new donor materials for small-molecule organic solar cells due to their inherent advantages of well-defined molecular weight, easy purification, and good reproducibility in photovoltaic performance. Herein, we report two small-molecule donors that are compatible with both fullerene and nonfullerene acceptors. Both molecules consist of an (E)-1,2-di(thiophen-2-yl)ethane-substituted (TVT-substituted) benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']dithiophene (BDT) as the central unit, and two rhodanine units as the terminal electron-withdrawing groups. The central units are modified with either alkyl side chains (DRBDT-TVT) or alkylthio side chains (DRBDT-STVT). Both molecules exhibit a medium bandgap with complementary absorption and proper energy level offset with typical acceptors like PC₇₁BM and IDIC. The optimized devices show a decent power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 6.87% for small-molecule organic solar cells and 6.63% for nonfullerene all small-molecule organic solar cells. Our results reveal that rationally designed medium-bandgap small-molecule donors can be applied in high-performance small-molecule organic solar cells with different types of acceptors.

Keywords: compatibility; fullerene organic solar cell; fused-ring electron acceptor; nonfullerene organic solar cell; small-molecule donor.