Simple Nonfused-Ring Electron Acceptors with Noncovalently Conformational Locks for Low-Cost and High-Performance Organic Solar Cells Enabled by End-Group Engineering

The rapid advance of fused-ring electron acceptors (FREAs) has greatly promoted the leap-forward development of organic solar cells (OSCs). However, the synthetic complexity of FREAs may be detrimental for future commercial applications. Recently, nonfused-ring electron acceptors (NREAs) have been developed to be a promising candidate to maintain a rational balance between cost and performance, of which the cores are composed of simple fused rings (NREAs-I) or nonfused rings (NREAs-II). Moreover, noncovalently conformational locks, are used as an effective strategy to enhance the rigidity and planarity of NREAs and improve device performance. Herein, a novel series of NREAs-II (PhO4T-1, PhO4T-2, and PhO4T-3) is constructed as a valuable platform for exploring the impact of the end group engineering on optoelectronic properties, intermolecular packing behaviors, and device performance. As a result, a high power conversion efficiency of 13.76% is achieved for PhO4T-3 based OSCs, which is much higher than those of the PhO4T-1 and PhO4T-2-based devices. Compared with several representative FREAs, PhO4T-3 possesses the highest figure-of-merit value of 133.45 based on a cost-efficiency evaluation. This work demonstrates that the simple-structured NREAs-II are promising candidates for low-cost and high-performance OSCs.

Automated summary

The development of nonfused-ring electron acceptors (NREAs) as a promising candidate for organic solar cells (OSCs) is presented in this paper. A novel series of NREAs-II are constructed to explore their impact on device performance, demonstrating their potential for low-cost and high-performance OSCs.