Using volatile additives to alter the morphology and performance of active layers in thin-film molecular photovoltaic devices incorporating bulk heterojunctions

Thin-film photovoltaic devices composed of polymers or small molecules have an exciting future as sources of renewable energy because they can be made in large sizes on flexible surfaces by inexpensive techniques of fabrication. Significant progress in developing new molecular photovoltaic materials and device architectures has been achieved in the last decade. The identity of molecular components in active layers and their individual optoelectronic properties obviously help determine the properties of devices; in addition, however, the behavior of devices depends critically on the nature of the local organization of the components. Recent studies have shown that the morphology of active layers can be tuned by adjusting various parameters, including the solvent used to cast the layer, thermal annealing, and special processing additives. In this review, we summarize the effect of volatile additives on the nanoscale morphology of molecular blends, and we show how these effects can improve the performance of devices. Although we focus on the behavior of mixtures of the type used in current molecular thin-film photovoltaic devices, the subject of our review will interest researchers in all areas of science and technology requiring materials in which separate phases must form intimate long-lived intermixtures with defined structures.