Ternary nonfullerene polymer solar cells with efficiency >13.7% by integrating the advantages of the materials and two binary cells

Abstract

Highly efficient ternary polymer solar cells (PSCs) are fabricated from two well-compatible small molecular nonfullerene acceptors (INPIC-4F and MeIC1) and one polymer donor, PBDB-T. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the INPIC-4F or MeIC1 based binary PSCs reaches 12.55% and 11.53%. Based on these efficient binary PSCs, a high PCE of 13.73% is achieved in the ternary PSCs with 50 wt% MeIC1 in the acceptors, resulting from the simultaneously improved short circuit current (J_SC) of 21.86 mA cm⁻², open circuit voltage (V_OC) of 0.88 V and fill factor (FF) of 71.39%. The PCE improvement of the ternary PSCs should be mainly attributed to the simultaneously optimized photon harvesting and film morphology of the ternary active layers. This result may provide more in-depth insight into the material selection criteria for fabricating highly efficient ternary PSCs: (i) the complementary absorption spectra and good compatibility of the used materials; (ii) the complementary photovoltaic parameters of the corresponding two binary PSCs.