Smart Ternary Strategy in Promoting the Performance of Polymer Solar Cells Based on Bulk-Heterojunction or Layer-By-Layer Structure

Although the rapid development of polymer solar cells (PSCs) has been achieved, it is still a great challenge to explore efficient ways for improving power conversion efficiency (PCE) of PSCs from materials and device engineering. Ternary strategy has been confirmed as an efficient way to improve PCE of PSCs by employing three kinds of materials. In this work, one polymer donor PM6, and two non-fullerene materials N3 and MF1 are selected to prepare ternary PSCs with layer-by-layer (LbL) or bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) structure. The LbL and BHJ-PSCs exhibit PCEs of 16.75% and 16.76% with 15 wt% MF1 content in acceptors, corresponding to over 5% or 4% PCE improvement compared with N3-based binary PSCs with LbL or BHJ structure. The PCE improvement is mainly attributed to the fill factor enhancement from 73.29% to 76.95% for LbL-PSCs or from 74.13% to 77.51% for BHJ-PSCs by employing the ternary strategy. This work indicates that ternary strategy has great potential in preparing highly efficient LbL-PSCs via simultaneously optimizing molecular arrangement and the thickness of each layer.

Automated summary

The study explores the use of a ternary strategy to improve the power conversion efficiency of polymer solar cells (PSCs) by incorporating three different materials. Results show that the ternary PSCs exhibit significantly higher PCE compared to binary PSCs, mainly due to an increase in fill factor. This approach has demonstrated great potential for preparing highly efficient PSCs by optimizing molecular arrangement and layer thickness simultaneously.