Miscibility Tuning for Optimizing Phase Separation and Vertical Distribution toward Highly Efficient Organic Solar Cells

Blending multidonor or multiacceptor organic materials as ternary devices has been recognized as an efficient and potential method to improve the power conversion efficiency of bulk heterojunction devices or single-junction components in tandem design. In this work, a highly crystalline molecule, DRCN5T, is involved into a PTB7-Th:PC70BM system to fabricate large-area organic solar cells (OSCs) whose blend film thickness is up to 270 nm, achieving an impressive performance of 11.1%. The significant improvement of OSCs after adding DRCN5T is due to the formation of an interconnected fibrous network with decreased pi-pi stacking and enhanced domain purity, in addition to the optimized vertical distribution of PTB7-Th and PC70BM, producing more effective charge separation, transport, and collection. The optimized morphology and performance are actually determined by the miscibility in different components, which can be quantitatively described by the Flory-Huggins interaction parameter of -0.80 and 2.94 in DRCN5T:PTB7-Th and DRCN5T:PC70BM blends, respectively. The findings in this work can potentially guide the selection of an appropriate third additive for high-performance OSCs for the sake of large-area printing and roll-to-roll fabrication from the view of miscibility.