Boosting Highly Efficient Hydrocarbon Solvent-Processed All-Polymer-Based Organic Solar Cells by Modulating Thin-Film Morphology

Many highly efficient all-polymer-based organic solar cells (OSCs) have been achieved owing to material design and device engineering. However, most of them were achieved by using halogenated solvents to process the active layers, being not beneficial to its nature of green energy technology. In this work, we compared chloroform- and toluene-processed PM6:PY-IT-based all-polymer devices with the same blend solution recipe, same film formation speed, and same postcast treatment. The film cast from toluene exhibited weaker crystallinity. For device performance, toluene enabled a better power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 15.51%, outperforming that of chloroform (15.00%), and it is the highest value for non-halogenated solvent-cast all-polymer-based OSCs to date. Toluene's morphology tuning effect was characterized to increase and balance the charge transport and then suppress the exciton recombination and improve the charge extraction, considered to be the reason for efficiency enhancement. Besides, the toluene-cast active layer-based devices showed slightly better photostability than the chloroform-driven ones. This work provided a new direction for building low-toxicity solvent-treated all- polymer OSCs with cutting-edge performance.

Automated summary

The study compared all-polymer devices processed with chloroform and toluene, and found that toluene processing resulted in higher power conversion efficiency and better photostability. This work offers a new direction for developing high-performance, low-toxicity solvent-treated all-polymer OSCs.