Journal
NANO LETTERS
Volume 10, Issue 8, Pages 2863-2869Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/nl1009266
Keywords
Polymer blends; X-ray scattering; organic solar cells; morphology
Categories
Funding
- US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Science, Division of Materials Science and Engineering [DE-FG02-98ER45737]
- US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Science
- EPSRC
- W. Schlotter (while at Stanford University)
- EPSRC [EP/E051804/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/E051804/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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The bulk nanomorphology of organic bulk heterojunction devices, particularly of all-polymer devices, is difficult to characterize due to limited electron density contrast between constituent materials. Resonant soft X-ray scattering can overcome this problem and is used to show that the morphologies in chloroform cast and subsequently annealed polylluorene copolymer poly(9,9'-dioctylfluorene-co-bis(N-N'(4,butylphenyl))bis(N,N'-phenyl-1,4-phenylene)diamine) (PFB) and poly(9,9'-dioctylfluorene-co-benzothiadiazole) (F8BT) blends exhibit a hierarchy of length scales with impure domains in as-cast films. With annealing, these domains first become purer at the smallest length scale and only then evolve in size with annealing. Even optimized cells using present fabrication methods are found to have a dominant domain size much larger than the exciton diffusion length. The observed morphology is Far from ideal for efficient solar cell operation and very different front those achieved in high-efficiency fullerene-based devices. This strongly implies that lack of morphological control contributes to the relatively poor performance of the all-polymer PFB/F8BT devices and may be problematic for all-polymer devices in general. Novel processing strategies will have to be employed to harness the full potential these high open circuit voltage devices offer.
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