Manipulating Polymer Donors Toward a High-Performance Polymer Acceptor Based On a Fused Perylenediimide Building Block With a Built-In Twisting Configuration

Yuli Yin; Zhi Zheng; Yi Lu; Daoyuan Chen; Ming Liu; Fengyun Guo; Shiyong Gao; Liancheng Zhao; Yong Zhang

doi:10.1021/acsami.9b07067

Manipulating Polymer Donors Toward a High-Performance Polymer Acceptor Based On a Fused Perylenediimide Building Block With a Built-In Twisting Configuration

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2019 Aug 21;11(33):29765-29772. doi: 10.1021/acsami.9b07067. Epub 2019 Aug 7.

Authors

Yuli Yin¹, Zhi Zheng¹, Yi Lu¹, Daoyuan Chen¹, Ming Liu¹, Fengyun Guo¹, Shiyong Gao¹, Liancheng Zhao¹, Yong Zhang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ School of Materials Science and Engineering , Harbin Institute of Technology , Harbin 150001 , China.
² School of Materials Science and Engineering , Zhengzhou University , Zhengzhou 450001 , China.

PMID: 31337214
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.9b07067

Abstract

A novel fused perylene diimide (PDI)-based polymer electron acceptor (PFPDI-BDF) with a built-in twisting configuration was constructed for application in all-polymer solar cells (all-PSCs). To shed light on the compatibility of the FPDI polymer acceptor and to identify a suitable polymer donor for device applications, we considered herein to investigate three polymer donors (PBDB-T, PTB7-Th, and PCPDTFBT) with different optical and electronic properties as well as polymer chain packing behavior for comparing the device performance. After being fabricated with PFPDI-BDF, polymer donor PBDB-T with a wide band gap showed a decent power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 4.86% with an open-circuit voltage (V_oc) of 0.82 V, a short-circuit current density (J_sc) of 8.94 mA cm^-2, and a recorded fill factor (FF) of 66.3%, which is one of the best FF reported for PDI-based all-polymer solar cells (all-PSCs). The enhanced efficiency of 6.05% was found in the medium band gap polymer PTB7-Th devices due to the more complementary absorption region that makes the photoactive blends absorb more photons, giving rise to an increased J_sc of 12.97 mA cm^-2. On the other hand, due to the inferior exciton dissociation/extraction efficiency and unfavorable morphology compatibility, the narrow band gap polymer donor PCPDTFBT/PFPDI-BDF devices exhibited the worst PCE of only 0.71% with a low J_sc of 2.2 mA cm^-2 and a FF of 42.4%.

Keywords: built-in twisting configuration; compatibility; fused perylene diimide; polymer electron acceptor; power conversion efficiency.