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Trialkylsilyl-thiophene-conjugated acceptor for efficient organic solar cells compatible with spin-coating and blade-coating technologies

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  • Special Issue: 2024 Emerging Investigator Issue
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Abstract

Sidechain engineering as an efficient and convenient strategy has been widely used to optimize molecular structure of photovoltaic materials for boosting power conversion efficiency (PCE) of organic solar cells (OSCs). Herein, a new Y-series acceptor named Y-ThSi with trialkylsilyl-substituted thiophene as conjugated sidechain is developed. Compared with its parental Y6 with multiple intermolecular interactions, Y-ThSi has a unitary molecular packing due to the additional steric hindrance from two-dimensional (2D)-conjugated trialkylsilyl-thiophene. Therefore, Y-ThSi shows an obviously blue-shifted absorption with an onset of ~850 nm but significantly up-shifted lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy level. For the PM6:Y-ThSi pair, the spin-coating OSCs achieve a decent PCE of 14.56% with an impressively high photovoltage (VOC) of 0.936 V. Inspired by its high VOC and narrow absorption, Y-ThSi is introduced into near-infrared absorbing binary PM6:BTP-eC9 host to construct ternary OSCs. Thanks to the complementary absorption, optimized morphology, and minimized energy loss properties, the PM6: BTP-eC9:Y-ThSi-based OSCs offer a higher PCE of 18.34%. Moreover, our developed strategy can overcome the commonly existed PCE drop when the blade-coating towards large-scale printing is used instead. Therefore, a comparable PCE of 18.34% is achieved, which is one of the best values for the blade-coating OSCs so far.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22209131, 22005121, 21875182, 52173023), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFE0132400), the Key Scientific and Technological Innovation Team Project of Shaanxi Province (2020TD-002), and the 111 Project 2.0 (BP0618008). X-ray data were acquired at beamlines 7.3.3 and 11.0.1.2 at the Advanced Light Source, which is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The authors thank Dr. Eric Schaible and Dr. Chenhui Zhu at beamline 7.3.3, and Dr. Cheng Wang at beamline 11.0.1.2 for assistance with data acquisition.

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  1. These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, ** Fan & Wei Ma

  2. School of Materials Science and Engineering, ** Fan

  3. College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Bei**g, 100871, China

    Ze-Fan Yao

  4. The Institute for Advanced Studies, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Rui Sun & Jie Min

  5. Bei**g National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bei**g, 100190, China

    **aojun Li

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  1. Tengfei Li
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Correspondence to Qiang Wu, Qun** Fan or Wei Ma.

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Trialkylsilyl-Thiophene-Conjugated Acceptor for Efficiency Organic Solar Cells Compatible with Spin-Coating and Blade-Coating Technologies

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Li, T., Wu, Q., Yao, ZF. et al. Trialkylsilyl-thiophene-conjugated acceptor for efficient organic solar cells compatible with spin-coating and blade-coating technologies. Sci. China Chem. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-023-1913-3

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