High-performance and low-cost organic solar cells based on pentacyclic A–DA′D–A acceptors with efficiency over 16%

Abstract

Developing high-performance and low-cost donor/acceptor materials is crucial for the industrialization of organic solar cells (OSCs). Therefore, a series of new donor and acceptor materials with simple structures and easy synthesis have been reported. However, how to further achieve low-cost and high-performance OSCs is still an issue that should be solved when competing with other photovoltaic technologies. Herein, we demonstrate a high-performance and low-cost PTQ10:Y26 system with an impressive efficiency of 16.01% via a series of morphology optimizations. Moreover, the devices demonstrated excellent bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) thickness tolerance over the range of 100 nm to 300 nm, which is beneficial for large-scale fabrications. Besides, we calculated the industrial figure of merit (i-FOM) of the PTQ10:Y26 system and made a relatively comprehensive comparison with other classic BHJ combinations based on A–DA′D–A acceptors. The PTQ10:Y26 system shows a high FOM of over 0.3, which is among the high FOM values for OSCs now. Combining with the merits of low cost, high efficiency and thickness insensitivity, we firmly believe that PTQ10:Y26 shows great potential in the commercialization for OSCs.