17.1% Efficient Single-Junction Organic Solar Cells Enabled by n-Type Doping of the Bulk-Heterojunction
Type
ArticleAuthors
Lin, YuanbaoFirdaus, Yuliar

Nugraha, Mohamad Insan
Liu, Feng
Karuthedath, Safakath

Emwas, Abdul-Hamid M.
Zhang, Weimin
Seitkhan, Akmaral

Neophytou, Marios
Faber, Hendrik

Yengel, Emre

McCulloch, Iain

Tsetseris, Leonidas
Laquai, Frédéric

Anthopoulos, Thomas D.

KAUST Department
Chemical Science ProgramKAUST Solar Center (KSC)
Material Science and Engineering
Material Science and Engineering Program
NMR
Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division
KAUST Grant Number
OSR-2018-CARF/CCF-3079Date
2020-02-13Online Publication Date
2020-02-13Print Publication Date
2020-04Submitted Date
2019-11-27Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/661532
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Molecular doping is often used in organic semiconductors to tune their (opto) electronic properties. Despite its versatility, however, its application in organic photovoltaics (OPVs) remains limited and restricted to p-type dopants. In an effort to control the charge transport within the bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) of OPVs, the n-type dopant benzyl viologen (BV) is incorporated in a BHJ composed of the donor polymer PM6 and the small-molecule acceptor IT-4F. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the cells is found to increase from 13.2% to 14.4% upon addition of 0.004 wt% BV. Analysis of the photoactive materials and devices reveals that BV acts simultaneously as n-type dopant and microstructure modifier for the BHJ. Under optimal BV concentrations, these synergistic effects result in balanced hole and electron mobilities, higher absorption coefficients and increased charge-carrier density within the BHJ, while significantly extending the cells’ shelf-lifetime. The n-type doping strategy is applied to five additional BHJ systems, for which similarly remarkable performance improvements are obtained. OPVs of particular interest are based on the ternary PM6:Y6:PC71BM:BV(0.004 wt%) blend for which a maximum PCE of 17.1%, is obtained. The effectiveness of the n-doping strategy highlights electron transport in NFA-based OPVs as being a key issue.Citation
Lin, Y., Firdaus, Y., Nugraha, M. I., Liu, F., Karuthedath, S., Emwas, A., … Anthopoulos, T. D. (2020). 17.1% Efficient Single-Junction Organic Solar Cells Enabled by n-Type Doping of the Bulk-Heterojunction. Advanced Science, 1903419. doi:10.1002/advs.201903419Sponsors
This publication is based upon work supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) under Award No: OSR-2018-CARF/CCF-3079. L.T. acknowledges support for the computational time granted from the GRNET facility ARIS under project STEM-2.Publisher
WileyJournal
Advanced ScienceAdditional Links
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/advs.201903419https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/advs.201903419
ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1002/advs.201903419
Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2020 The Authors. Published by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.