Simultaneously Achieving Highly Efficient and Stable Polymer:Non-Fullerene Solar Cells Enabled By Molecular Structure Optimization and Surface Passivation

Despite the tremendous efforts in developing non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) for polymer solar cells (PSCs), only few researches are done on studying the NFA molecular structure dependent stability of PSCs, and long-term stable PSCs are only reported for the cells with low efficiency. Herein, the authors compare the stability of inverted PM6:NFA solar cells using ITIC, IT-4F, Y6, and N3 as the NFA, and a decay rate order of IT-4F > Y6 approximate to N3 > ITIC is measured. Quantum chemical calculations reveal that fluorine substitution weakens the CC bond and enhances the interaction between NFA and ZnO, whereas the beta-alkyl chains on the thiophene unit next to the CC linker blocks the attacking of hydroxyl radicals onto the CC bonds. Knowing this, the authors choose a bulky alkyl side chain containing molecule (named L8-BO) as the acceptor, which shows slower photo bleaching and performance decay rates. A combination of ZnO surface passivation with phenylethanethiol (PET) yields a high efficiency of 17% and an estimated long T-80 and Ts-80 of 5140 and 6170 h, respectively. The results indicate functionalization of the beta-position of the thiophene unit is an effective way to improve device stability of the NFA.

Automated summary

By comparing the stability of different non-fullerene acceptors in polymer solar cells, this study found that functionalization at the beta-position of the thiophene unit can improve the stability of non-fullerene acceptor devices.