Polymer Solar Cells with Active Layer Thickness Compatible with Scalable Fabrication Processes: A Meta-Analysis

Organic photovoltaics (OPV) has been considered for a long time a promising emerging solar technology. Currently, however, market shares of OPV are practically non-existent. A detailed meta-analysis of the literature published until mid-2021 is presented, focusing on one of the remaining issues that need to be addressed to translate the recent remarkable progress, obtained in devices' performance at lab-scale level, into the requirements able to boost the manufacturing-scale production. Namely, the active layer's thickness is referred to, which, together with device efficiency and stability, represents one of the biggest challenges of this technological research field. Papers describing solar cells containing non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) binary and ternary blends, as well as NFA plus fullerene acceptor (FA) ternary blends are reviewed. The common ground of all analyzed devices is their high-thickness active layers, compatible with large-area deposition techniques. By defining a new figure of merit to discuss the OPV thickness (thickness tolerance, TT), it is found that this parameter is not affected by the chemical family's nature of the active blend components. On the other hand, the analysis suggests that there are promising strategies to improve the TT, which are discussed in the conclusion section.

Automated summary

Organic photovoltaics (OPV) has long been regarded as a promising emerging solar technology, but currently it has very little market share. This article presents a detailed meta-analysis of the literature published until mid-2021, focusing on the remaining issue of active layer thickness in order to translate the recent progress in device performance at lab-scale level into manufacturing-scale production. The analysis of solar cells containing non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) binary and ternary blends, as well as NFA plus fullerene acceptor (FA) ternary blends reveals that the thickness of the active layers is a significant challenge. However, the study also identifies promising strategies to improve the thickness tolerance (TT), which are discussed in the conclusion section.