Journal
CHEMISTRY OF MATERIALS
Volume 34, Issue 7, Pages 3267-3279Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.2c00065
Keywords
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Funding
- US Office of Naval Research [N00014-20-1-2116]
- Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program
- Soft and Hybrid Nanotechnology Experimental (SHyNE) Resource [NSF ECCS-2025633]
- International Institute of Nanotechnology, and Northwestern University
- National Science Foundation MRSEC Program of the Northwestern University Materials Research Center [NSF DMR-1720139]
- GIANTFab core facility at Northwestern University
- Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern
- Office of the Vice President for Research at Northwestern
- U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
- DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory [DE-AC02-06CH11357]
- Junta de Andalucia [UMA18-FEDERJA-080, P18-FR-4559]
- MICINN [PID2019-110305GB-I00]
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The development of readily accessible polymer acceptors is crucial for the advancement of all-polymer solar cells as a low-cost and sustainable alternative energy technology. This study presents a computationally guided design and facile synthesis of new acceptor polymers, PNIT and r-PNIT, incorporating structurally simple NDI and IID units. The incorporation of PNIT into all-polymer solar cells results in significantly higher power conversion efficiency compared to r-PNIT, attributed to improved charge transport properties.
The development of readily accessible polymer acceptors is imperative to preserve the guiding principles of all-polymer solar cells as a low-cost and sustainable technology for alternative energy production. In this study, we report a computationally guided design and facile synthesis of new acceptor polymers comprising the alternating copolymer, PNIT, and the corresponding random copolymer, r-PNIT, which incorporate structurally simple naphthalene diimide (NDI) and isoindigo (IID) units. PNIT was prepared via direct arylation polymerization (DArP), which proceeds via C-H activation and avoids the use of toxic reagents and extended synthetic pathways for the monomer synthesis. PNIT has broad optical absorption in the 300-850 nm range and an enhanced absorption coefficient (47 x 10(3) cm(-1)) compared to r-PNIT (300-850 nm; 40 x 10(3) cm(-1)). When incorporated in all-polymer solar cells (APSCs) using PBDB-T as the donor polymer, PBDB-T:PNIT provides greater than two times the average (maximum) power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 5.18 +/- 0.08 (5.32)% compared to that of PBDB-T:r-PNIT, 2.38 +/- 0.16 (2.57)%, due to increased J(sc) (10.36 vs 5.45 mA cm(-2)) and fill factor (FF) (0.58 vs 0.50) metrics. The PBDB-T:PNIT PCE is among the highest reported for an IID-based APSC and demonstrates the viability of DArP for the synthesis of new APSC acceptor polymers. Detailed morphological and microstructural investigations using atomic force microscopy (AFM) and grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS), respectively, reveal enhanced texturing for PNIT, which enhances charge transport properties as supported by space-charge-limited current (SCLC) mobility measurements.
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