Single-Junction Organic Photovoltaic Cell with 19% Efficiency

Yong Cui; Ye Xu; Huifeng Yao; Pengqing Bi; Ling Hong; Jianqi Zhang; Yunfei Zu; Tao Zhang; Jinzhao Qin; Junzhen Ren; Zhihao Chen; Chang He; Xiaotao Hao; Zhixiang Wei; Jianhui Hou

doi:10.1002/adma.202102420

Single-Junction Organic Photovoltaic Cell with 19% Efficiency

Adv Mater. 2021 Oct;33(41):e2102420. doi: 10.1002/adma.202102420. Epub 2021 Aug 31.

Authors

Yong Cui¹, Ye Xu^{1

2}, Huifeng Yao¹, Pengqing Bi¹, Ling Hong^{1

2}, Jianqi Zhang³, Yunfei Zu^{1

2}, Tao Zhang¹, Jinzhao Qin^{1

2}, Junzhen Ren¹, Zhihao Chen⁴, Chang He¹, Xiaotao Hao⁴, Zhixiang Wei^{2

3}, Jianhui Hou^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Research/Education Center for Excellence in Molecular Sciences, Institute of Chemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.
² School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, University of Chinses Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
³ CAS Key Laboratory of Nanosystem and Hierarchical Fabrication, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, 100190, China.
⁴ School of Physics, State Key Laboratory of Crystal Materials, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, 250100, P. R. China.

PMID: 34464466
DOI: 10.1002/adma.202102420

Abstract

Improving power conversion efficiency (PCE) is important for broadening the applications of organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells. Here, a maximum PCE of 19.0% (certified value of 18.7%) is achieved in single-junction OPV cells by combining material design with a ternary blending strategy. An active layer comprising a new wide-bandgap polymer donor named PBQx-TF and a new low-bandgap non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) named eC9-2Cl is rationally designed. With optimized light utilization, the resulting binary cell exhibits a good PCE of 17.7%. An NFA F-BTA3 is then added to the active layer as a third component to simultaneously improve the photovoltaic parameters. The improved light unitization, cascaded energy level alignment, and enhanced intermolecular packing result in open-circuit voltage of 0.879 V, short-circuit current density of 26.7 mA cm^-2 , and fill factor of 0.809. This study demonstrates that further improvement of PCEs of high-performance OPV cells requires fine tuning of the electronic structures and morphologies of the active layers.

Keywords: energy loss; light utilization; molecular design; organic photovoltaic cells; power conversion efficiency.

Abstract

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