Use of a commercially available nucleating agent to control the morphological development of solution-processed small molecule bulk heterojunction organic solar cells

Sharenko, Alexander; Treat, Neil D.; Love, John A.; Toney, Michael F.; Stingelin, Natalie; Nguyen, Thuc-Quyen

Type

Article

Authors

Sharenko, Alexander
Treat, Neil D.
Love, John A.
Toney, Michael F.
Stingelin, Natalie

Nguyen, Thuc-Quyen

Date

2014-08-12

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http://hdl.handle.net/10754/600142

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Abstract

© the Partner Organisations 2014. The nucleating agent DMDBS is used to modulate the crystallization of solution-processed small molecule donor molecules in bulk heterojunction organic photovoltaic (BHJ OPV) devices. This control over donor molecule crystallization leads to a reduction in optimized thermal annealing times as well as smaller donor molecule crystallites, and therefore more efficient devices, when using an excessive amount of solvent additive. We therefore demonstrate the use of nucleating agents as a powerful and versatile processing strategy for solution-processed, small molecule BHJ OPVs. This journal is

Citation

Sharenko A, Treat ND, Love JA, Toney MF, Stingelin N, et al. (2014) Use of a commercially available nucleating agent to control the morphological development of solution-processed small molecule bulk heterojunction organic solar cells. J Mater Chem A 2: 15717–15721. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c4ta03469d.

Sponsors

This work was supported in part by the United States Office of Naval Research. TEM characterization was supported by the Center for Energy Efficient Materials, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Office of Basic Sciences of the US Department of Energy and utilized MRL Shared Experimental Facilities supported by the MRSEC Program of the NSF under Award no. DMR 1121053; a member of the NSF-funded Materials Research Facilities Network (http://www.mrfn.org). A. S would like to acknowledge support from a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Portions of this research were conducted at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource user facility, operated by Stanford University on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Use of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Contract no. DE-AC02-76SF00515. N.D.T. acknowledges support from the NSF IRFP (OISE-1201915) and European Research Council Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship under Grant Agreement number 300091. We moreover acknowledge support by KAUST through a Global Collaborative Research Academic Excellence Alliance (AEA) grant as well as a Competitive Research grant (CRG-1-2012-THO-015-IMP). N.S. is furthermore supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Independent Researcher Fellowship under the grant agreement no. 279587. The authors would like to thank Milliken Chemical for providing a sample of DMDBS.