A Fully Non-fused Ring Acceptor with Planar Backbone and Near-IR Absorption for High Performance Polymer Solar Cells

Ya-Nan Chen; Miao Li; Yunzhi Wang; Jing Wang; Ming Zhang; Yuanyuan Zhou; Jianming Yang; Yahui Liu; Feng Liu; Zheng Tang; Qinye Bao; Zhishan Bo

doi:10.1002/anie.202010856

A Fully Non-fused Ring Acceptor with Planar Backbone and Near-IR Absorption for High Performance Polymer Solar Cells

Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2020 Dec 7;59(50):22714-22720. doi: 10.1002/anie.202010856. Epub 2020 Oct 7.

Authors

Ya-Nan Chen¹, Miao Li², Yunzhi Wang², Jing Wang³, Ming Zhang⁴, Yuanyuan Zhou², Jianming Yang⁵, Yahui Liu¹, Feng Liu⁴, Zheng Tang³, Qinye Bao⁵, Zhishan Bo^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ College of Textiles & Clothing, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, China.
² Beijing Key Laboratory of Energy Conversion and Storage Materials, College of Chemistry, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China.
³ Center for Advanced Low-dimension Materials, State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Donghua University, Shanghai, 201620, China.
⁴ Frontiers Science Center for Transformative Molecules, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, P. R. China.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Polar Materials and Devices, Department of Optoelectronics, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, China.

PMID: 32866327
DOI: 10.1002/anie.202010856

Abstract

Fused-ring electron acceptors have made significant progress in recent years, while the development of fully non-fused ring acceptors has been unsatisfactory. Here, two fully non-fused ring acceptors, o-4TBC-2F and m-4TBC-2F, were designed and synthesized. By regulating the location of the hexyloxy chains, o-4TBC-2F formed planar backbones, while m-4TBC-2F displayed a twisted backbone. Additionally, the o-4TBC-2F film showed a markedly red-shifted absorption after thermal annealing, which indicated the formation of J-aggregates. For fabrication of organic solar cells (OSCs), PBDB-T was used as a donor and blended with the two acceptors. The o-4TBC-2F-based blend films displayed higher charge mobilities, lower energy loss and a higher power conversion efficiency (PCE). The optimized devices based on o-4TBC-2F gave a PCE of 10.26 %, which was much higher than those based on m-4TBC-2F at 2.63 %, and it is one of the highest reported PCE values for fully non-fused ring electron acceptors.

Keywords: J-aggregation; electron acceptors; fully nonfused acceptors; organic solar cells.

Grants and funding

51933001, 21734009 and 21421003/National Natural Science Foundation of China