Abstract
Organic photovoltaics show high promise as a technology for sustainable energy conversion. A prominent strategy to reduce the substantial energy loss of organic solar cells is to synthesize high-permittivity (high-ϵ) active layer materials. However, despite the increase in permittivity, many of the high-ϵ materials achieved only inferior efficiencies, which is generally explained with a worse bulk heterojunction morphology. In this work, we tackled this issue by preparing high-ϵ acceptors and incorporating them in a bilayer setup, which we optimized using the systematic Design of Experiment (DoE) approach. The prepared acceptors are based on a perylene-linker-perylene scaffold, to which we attached polar sulfone-containing side chains. The relative permittivity of these acceptors increased by over 50% compared to their alkylated analogues. Simultaneously, some of the acceptors have greatly improved solubilities in non-halogenated “green” solvents. Both improvements enabled us to build bilayer organic solar cells from o-xylene and THF with PTQ10 as the donor, while simultaneously increasing the efficiency to 5.51% with a high open-circuit voltage of 1.3 V. Our results show that using a bilayer setup can successfully prevent morphology-related efficiency losses when employing high-ϵ materials. Combining this approach with a systematic optimization method (DoE) can unlock the theoretical potential of permittivity modification in organic solar cell research.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1544-1554 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | ACS Applied Energy Materials |
Volume | 6 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 13 Feb 2023 |
Keywords
- bilayer solar cell
- Design of Experiment
- dye synthesis
- organic solar cells
- permittivity
- sulfone side chains
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Chemical Engineering (miscellaneous)
- Energy Engineering and Power Technology
- Materials Chemistry
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Electrochemistry
Fields of Expertise
- Advanced Materials Science