Recently, all‐polymer solar cells (all‐PSCs) have received increasing attention and made tremendous progress. However, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of all‐PSCs still lags behind the polymer‐donor‐small‐molecule‐acceptor based organic solar cells, owing to the excessive phase separation with poor miscibility between polymer donor and acceptor. In this research, an “end‐capped” ternary strategy is proposed by introducing PM6TPO as a third component to fabricate highly efficient all‐PSCs. The PM6:PM6TPO:PY‐IT based ternary devices exhibit impressive PCE of 17.0% with enhanced light absorption and optimal morphology, and the introduction of PM6TPO significantly reduces the phase separation. The ternary devices also exhibit improved stability, outstanding tolerance of active layer thickness, and high performance of 1 cm2 unit cells. More importantly, the “end‐capped” ternary strategy enables efficient and facile improvement of all‐PSCs performance without additional selection and complicated synthesis for the third component.
The high‐performance organic solar cells (OSCs) tend to choose the polymers with high molecular weight as donors, which easily produce good crystallinity to facilitate intermolecular charge transfer. However, these polymers usually accompanied by the low solubility and synthetic difficulty, increasing batch‐to‐batch variations. The proposal of conjugated mesopolymers (molar mass (Mn) in 1–10 kDa) can overcome these problems. Herein, a new mesopolymer, MePBDFClH as donor material is designed and synthesized, and firstly applied in OSCs. As a comparison, other lower molecular weight mesopolymer of MePBDFClL and higher molecular weight polymer of PBDFCl with same structure are also prepared and investigated. Because of its appropriate phase separation and miscibility in the blend film, the MePBDFClH exhibits the highest power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 15.06% among the three materials. Meanwhile, the champion PCE is a new record for benzo[1,2‐b:4,5‐b′]difuran‐based photovoltaic materials. Importantly, comparing to the pronounced PCE decrease of polymer PBDFCl by about 12%, a slightly PCE difference for mespolymer MePBDFClL is only less than 5%, reducing the batch‐to‐batch variation. This work not only suggests that the benzo[1,2‐b:4,5‐b′]difuran unit is a promising electron‐donating core but also shows that the mesopolymers have great potentials to produce the low‐differentiated and high‐performance organic photovoltaic materials.
With the development of organic solar cells (OSCs), the high-performance and stable batch variance are becoming a new challenge for designing polymer donors. To obtain high photovoltaic performance, adopting polymers with high molecular weight as donors is an ordinary strategy. However, the high molecular weight need to subtly control the reaction time and state, inevitably caused batch-to-batch variations. Herein, a strategy of steric effect is applied to benzodifuran (BDF)-based polymer by introducing different positions of Cl atom, producing two polymers PBDFCl-1 and PBDFCl-2. The more twisted side chains conformation not only achieve the control of moderate molecular weight for PBDFCl-2, but also easily form molecular stacking through adopting BDF unit and maintain sufficient polymeric crystallinity. Due to the optimized stacking mode and good blend miscibility, PBDFCl-2-based device exhibitsa more elegant power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 17.00% compared to PBDFCl-1-based device. This is the highest efficiency record for BDF-based binary OSCs. Meanwhile, the PCE device variation of the different molecular weights for PBDFCl-2 is little, indicating the reduction of the batch variation. Therefore, smartly using steric effect of Cl atom in strong crystalline BDF unit can form efficient molecular stacking regulations and realize the coordination of high-performance and stable batch variance.
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