An adequate avenue towards well-designed PBDT-DTNT:PCBM active layers via quantum dot/conductive polymer configurations

Graphene quantum dots (GQD) and carbon quantum dots (CQD) were employed to develop the patterned GQD/CQD/poly[benzodithiophene-bis(decyltetradecyl-thien) naphthothiadiazole] (PBDT-DTNT) short/long chain, crab-like GQD/semicrab-like CQD/poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) short chain, and pellet-like GQD/CQD/P3HT long chain supramolecules. Nanostructures were used in roles of modifier, donor, and acceptor constituents in ternary (PBDT-DTNT:[6,6]-phenyl-C71 butyric acid methyl ester (PC71BM)) and binary photoactive layers. Application of pre-designed patterned quantum dot (QD)/PBDT-DTNT short chain nano-hybrids as morphology modifier promoted the performance up to 4.79%. P3HT-based supramolecules acted conspicuously better than PBDT-DTNT ones. The highest efficacies of 7.14 and 6.24% were detected in PBDT-DTNT:PC71BM:GQD/P3HT short chain (14.63 mA cm(-2), 68.71%, 0.71 V and 287 Omega cm(2)) and PBDT-DTNT:PC71BM:CQD/P3HT short chain (13.35 mA cm(-2), 66.79%, 0.70 V and 447 Omega cm(2)) systems, respectively. In addition to ternary photovoltaics, the binary devices were fabricated using the QDs and their associated supramolecules as donor and acceptor agents. Exactly similar to ternary cells, the crab/semicrab-like and pellet-like nano-hybrids, acted better than the PBDT-DTNT patterned nano-hybrids. The best results were recorded for PBDT-DTNT:GQD/P3HT short chain (2.93%) and PBDT-DTNT:CQD/P3HT short chain (2.67%) solar cells. In second type of binary photovoltaics, the QDs and their correlated supramolecules were utilized as electron donor and a maximum performance of 0.22% was acquired. (C) 2021 The Korean Society of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Different types of quantum dots and supermolecules were employed to construct nanostructured materials with different morphologies, achieving high efficiencies in photovoltaic devices. The study indicates that supermolecules based on P3HT outperformed those based on PBDT-DTNT in terms of performance.