Organic p‐type materials are potential candidates as solution processable hole transport materials (HTMs) for colloidal quantum dot solar cells (CQDSCs) because of their good hole accepting/electron blocking characteristics and synthetic versatility. However, organic HTMs have still demonstrated inferior performance compared to conventional p‐type CQD HTMs. In this work, organic π‐conjugated polymer (π‐CP) based HTMs, which can achieve performance superior to that of state‐of‐the‐art HTM, p‐type CQDs, are developed. The molecular engineering of the π‐CPs alters their optoelectronic properties, and the charge generation and collection in CQDSCs using them are substantially improved. A device using PBDTTPD‐HT achieves power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 11.53% with decent air‐storage stability. This is the highest reported PCE among CQDSCs using organic HTMs, and even higher than the reported best solid‐state ligand exchange‐free CQDSC using pCQD‐HTM. From the viewpoint of device processing, device fabrication does not require any solid‐state ligand exchange step or layer‐by‐layer deposition process, which is favorable for exploiting commercial processing techniques.
A charge transport layer based on transition metal‐oxides prepared by an anhydrous sol–gel method normally requires high‐temperature annealing to achieve the desired quality. Although annealing is not a difficult process in the laboratory, it is definitely not a simple process in mass production, such as roll‐to‐roll, because of the inevitable long cooling step that follows. Therefore, the development of an annealing‐free solution‐processable metal‐oxide is essential for the large‐scale commercialization. In this work, a room‐temperature processable annealing‐free “aqueous” MoO
x
solution is developed and applied in non‐fullerene PBDB‐T‐2F:Y6 solar cells. By adjusting the concentration of water in the sol–gel route, an annealing‐free MoO
x
with excellent electrical properties is successfully developed. The PBDB‐T‐2F:Y6 solar cell with the general MoO
x
prepared by the anhydrous sol–gel method shows a low efficiency of 7.7% without annealing. If this anhydrous MoO
x
is annealed at 200 °C, the efficiency is recovered to 17.1%, which is a normal value typically observed in conventional structure PBDB‐T‐2F:Y6 solar cells. However, without any annealing process, the solar cell with aqueous MoO
x
exhibits comparable performance of 17.0%. In addition, the solar cell with annealing‐free aqueous MoO
x
exhibits better performance and stability without high‐temperature annealing compared to the solar cells with PEDOT:PSS.
Although the combination of wide band gap polymer donors and narrow band gap small-molecule acceptors achieved state-of-the-art performance as bulk heterojunction (BHJ) active layers for organic solar cells, there have been only several of the wide band gap polymers that actually realized high-efficiency devices over >10%. Herein, we developed high-efficiency, low-energy-loss fullerene-free organic solar cells using a weakly crystalline wide band gap polymer donor, PBDTTPD-HT, and a nonfullerene small-molecule acceptor, ITIC. The excessive intermolecular stacking of ITIC is efficiently suppressed by the miscibility with PBDTTPD-HT, which led to a well-balanced nanomorphology in the PBDTTPD-HT/ITIC BHJ active films. The favorable optical, electronic, and energetic properties of PBDTTPD-HT with respect to ITIC achieved panchromatic photon-to-current conversion with a remarkably low energy loss (0.59 eV).
Although the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of inorganic perovskite‐based solar cells (PSCs) is considerably less than that of organic‐inorganic hybrid PSCs due to their wider bandgap, inorganic perovskites are great candidates for the front cell in tandem devices. Herein, the low‐temperature solution‐processed two‐terminal hybrid tandem solar cell devices based on spectrally matched inorganic perovskite and organic bulk heterojunction (BHJ) are demonstrated. By matching optical properties of front and back cells using CsPbI2Br and PTB7‐Th:IEICO‐4F BHJ as the active materials, a remarkably enhanced stabilized PCE (18.04%) in the hybrid tandem device as compared to that of the single‐junction device (9.20% for CsPbI2Br and 10.45% for PTB7‐Th:IEICO‐4F) is achieved. Notably, the PCE of the hybrid tandem device is thus far the highest PCE among the reported tandem devices based on perovskite and organic material. Moreover, the long‐term stability of inorganic perovskite devices under humid conditions is improved in the hybrid tandem device due to the hydrophobicity of the PTB7‐Th:IEICO‐4F back cell. In addition, the potential promise of this type of hybrid tandem device is calculated, where a PCE of as much as ≈28% is possible by improving the external quantum efficiency and reducing energy loss in the sub‐cells.
While hole extraction is crucial for the external quantum efficiency of conventional n-i-p colloidal quantum dot (CQD) solar cells (CQDSCs), sulfur-passivated p-type CQDs (pCQDs) have been the best hole-transport material (HTM) thus far. In this work, we developed organic πconjugated polymers (π-CPs) that can achieve substantially improved HTM performance compared with conventional pCQDs. A weakly electron-withdrawing triisopropylsilylethynyl (TIPS) group was employed with a weak donor moiety, benzo[1,2-b:4,5:b']-dithiophene (BDT), in the push-pull structured π-CPs to optimize the optoelectronic properties of the HTM. The CQDSCs using TIPS-containing π-CPs achieved a substantially higher PCE (13.03%) than those previously reported using pCQD (11.33%) or π-CPs (11.25%) owing to the improved charge collection efficiency near the photoactive CQD layer/HTM interface. To the best of our knowledge, our CQDSCs using TIPS-based π-CPs achieved the highest reported PCE among SSE-free CQDSCs.
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