Rational Design of High Performance Conjugated Polymers for Organic Solar Cells

The research on the polymer-based solar cells (PSCs) has attracted an increasing amount of attention in recent years because PSCs pose potential advantages over mainstream inorganic-based solar cells, such as significantly reduced material/fabrication costs, flexible substrates, and light weight of finished solar cells. The research community has made great progress in the field of bulk heterojunction (BHJ) polymer solar cells since its inception in 1995. The power conversion efficiency (PCE), a key parameter to assess the performance of solar cells, has increased from 1% in the 1990s to over 8% just recently. These great advances are mainly fueled by the development of conjugated polymers used as the electron-donating materials in BHJ solar cells. In this Perspective, we first briefly review the progress on the design of conjugated polymers for polymer solar cells in the past 16 years. Since a conjugated polymer can be arbitrarily divided into three constituting components-the conjugated backbone, the side chains, and the substituents-we then focus on the rational design of conjugated polymers by separately discussing the influence of each component on the physical and photovoltaic (PV) properties of these polymers. Special attention is paid to the design of donor-acceptor type low-band-gap polymers because this approach is prevailing in the literature with its unique features. In doing so, we strive to extract useful rules for the rational design of conjugated polymers with predictable properties. We conclude by proposing future research opportunities to achieve even higher PCEs for PSCs.