Simultaneous Improvements in Efficiency and Stability of Organic Solar Cells via a Symmetric-Asymmetric Dual-Acceptor Strategy

Simultaneously achieving improvements in power conversion efficiency (PCE) and stability is the main task of the current development stage of organic solar cells (OSCs). This work reports a symmetry-asymmetry dual-acceptor (SADA) strategy to construct ternary devices, which is found to be feasible for increasing both the PCE and the operational lifetime of OSCs. In this contribution, the symmetric acceptor L8-BO and the asymmetric acceptor BTP-S9 are blended in equal proportions with polymer donor PM6 for the consideration of absorption spectrum complementarity and cascade energetic alignment. In addition, the features of crystallinity and miscibility of the dual-acceptor deliver optimized morphology lead to a high PCE of 18.84%. In addition, the asymmetric acceptor BTP-S9 with a larger dipole moment shows tighter molecular stacking and longer crystal correlation length, which favor intrinsic molecular photostability, and further consolidate the operational lifetime of OSCs when coordinated with L8-BO. This work demonstrates the efficacy of the SADA strategy for constructing efficient and stable OSCs.

Automated summary

This work introduces a symmetry-asymmetry dual-acceptor (SADA) strategy for constructing ternary devices, which increases both the power conversion efficiency (PCE) and the operational lifetime of organic solar cells (OSCs).