All-polymer organic solar cells with nano-to-micron hierarchical morphology and large light receiving angle

Rui Zeng; Lei Zhu; Ming Zhang; Wenkai Zhong; Guanqing Zhou; Jiaxing Zhuang; Tianyu Hao; Zichun Zhou; Libo Zhou; Nicolai Hartmann; Xiaonan Xue; Hao Jing; Fei Han; Yiming Bai; Hongbo Wu; Zheng Tang; Yecheng Zou; Haiming Zhu; Chun-Chao Chen; Yongming Zhang; Feng Liu

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-39832-4

All-polymer organic solar cells with nano-to-micron hierarchical morphology and large light receiving angle

Nat Commun. 2023 Jul 12;14(1):4148. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-39832-4.

Authors

Rui Zeng^#¹, Lei Zhu^#¹, Ming Zhang¹, Wenkai Zhong¹, Guanqing Zhou¹, Jiaxing Zhuang¹, Tianyu Hao¹, Zichun Zhou¹, Libo Zhou¹, Nicolai Hartmann², Xiaonan Xue³, Hao Jing³, Fei Han⁴, Yiming Bai⁴, Hongbo Wu⁵, Zheng Tang⁵, Yecheng Zou⁶, Haiming Zhu⁷, Chun-Chao Chen⁸, Yongming Zhang¹, Feng Liu⁹

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Frontiers Science Center for Transformative Molecules, In-situ Center for Physical Science, and Center of Hydrogen Science Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.
² Attocube Systems AG, Eglfinger Weg 2, Haar, 85540, Germany.
³ Shanghai OPV Solar New Energy Technology Co., Ltd, Shanghai, 201210, China.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, 102206, China.
⁵ Center for Advanced Low-dimension Materials, State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering Donghua University, Shanghai, 201620, China.
⁶ State Key Laboratory of Fluorinated Functional Membrane Materials and Dongyue Future Hydrogen Energy Materials Company, Zibo City, Shandong, 256401, China.
⁷ Department of Chemistry, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310027, China.
⁸ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.
⁹ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Frontiers Science Center for Transformative Molecules, In-situ Center for Physical Science, and Center of Hydrogen Science Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China. fengliu82@sjtu.edu.cn.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Distributed photovoltaics in living environment harvest the sunlight in different incident angles throughout the day. The development of planer solar cells with large light-receiving angle can reduce the requirements in installation form factor and is therefore urgently required. Here, thin film organic photovoltaics with nano-sized phase separation integrated in micro-sized surface topology is demonstrated as an ideal solution to proposed applications. All-polymer solar cells, by means of a newly developed sequential processing, show large magnitude hierarchical morphology with facilitated exciton-to-carrier conversion. The nano fibrilar donor-acceptor network and micron-scale optical field trapping structure in combination contributes to an efficiency of 19.06% (certified 18.59%), which is the highest value to date for all-polymer solar cells. Furthermore, the micron-sized surface topology also contributes to a large light-receiving angle. A 30% improvement of power gain is achieved for the hierarchical morphology comparing to the flat-morphology devices. These inspiring results show that all-polymer solar cell with hierarchical features are particularly suitable for the commercial applications of distributed photovoltaics due to its low installation requirement.