The efficiency of polymer solar cells critically depends on the intimacy of mixing of the donor and acceptor semiconductors used in these devices to create charges and on the presence of unhindered percolation pathways in the individual components to transport holes and electrons. The visualization of these bulk heterojunction morphologies in three dimensions has been challenging and has hampered progress in this area. Here, we spatially resolve the morphology of 2%-efficient hybrid solar cells consisting of poly(3-hexylthiophene) as the donor and ZnO as the acceptor in the nanometre range by electron tomography. The morphology is statistically analysed for spherical contact distance and percolation pathways. Together with solving the three-dimensional exciton-diffusion equation, a consistent and quantitative correlation between solar-cell performance, photophysical data and the three-dimensional morphology has been obtained for devices with different layer thicknesses that enables differentiating between generation and transport as limiting factors to performance.

We report a novel method to determine the amount of pure, aggregated phase of donor and acceptor in organic photovoltaic (OPV) bulk heterojunctions. By determination of the diffraction intensity per unit volume for both donor and acceptor, the volume content of pure, aggregated donor and acceptor in the blend can be determined. We find that for the small molecule X2:[6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) system, in contrast to most polymer systems, all the PCBM is aggregated, indicating there is negligible miscibility of PCBM with X2. This provides an explanation why the performance of OPV devices of X2:PCBM are high over a large range of PCBM concentrations. This is in contrast to many other OPV blends, where PCBM forms a mixed phase with the donor and does not provide sufficient transport for electrons when the PCBM concentration is low. This study demonstrates that a mixed phase is not necessarily a requirement for good OPV device performance.

The efficiency of polymer – metal oxide hybrid solar cells depends critically on the intimacy of mixing of the two semiconductors. The effect of side chain functionalization on the morphology and performance of conjugated polymer:ZnO solar cells is investigated. Using an ester‐functionalized side chain poly(3‐hexylthiophene‐2,5‐diyl) derivative (P3HT‐E), the nanoscale morphology of ZnO:polymer solar cells is significantly more intimately mixed compared to ZnO:poly(3‐hexylthiophene‐2,5‐diyl) (ZnO:P3HT), as evidenced experimentally from a 3D reconstruction of the phase separation using electron tomography. Photoinduced absorption reveals nearly quantitative charge generation for the ZnO:P3HT‐E blend but not for ZnO:P3HT, consistent with the results obtained from solving the 3D diffusion equation for excitons formed in the polymer within the two experimental ZnO morphologies. For thin ZnO:P3HT‐E active layers (∼50 nm) this yields a significant improvement of the solar cell performance. For thicker cells, however, the reduced hole mobility and a reduced percolation of ZnO pathways hinders charge carrier collection, limiting the power conversion efficiency.

Controlling steric interactions between neighboring repeat units in donor–acceptor (D–A) alternating copolymers can positively impact morphologies and intermolecular electronic interactions necessary to obtain high performances in organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices. Herein, we design and synthesize 12 new conjugated D–A copolymers, employing ethynylene linkages for this control. We explore D–A combinations of fluorene, benzodithiophene, and diketopyrrolopyrrole with analogues of pyromellitic diimide, thienoisoindoledione, isothianaphthene, thienopyrazine, and thienopyrroledione. Computational modeling suggests the ethynylene-containing polymers can adopt virtually planar conformations, while many of the analogous polyarylenes lacking the ethynylene linkage are predicted to have quite twisted backbones (>35°). The introduction of ethynylene linkages into these D–A systems universally results in a significant blue-shift in the absorbance spectra (by as much as 100 nm) and a deeper HOMO value (∼0.1 eV) as compared to the polyarylene analogues. The contactless time-resolved microwave conductivity technique is used to measure the photoconductance of polymer/fullerene blends and is further discussed as a tool for screening potential active layer materials for OPV devices. Finally, we demonstrate that an ethynylene-linked alternating copolymer of diketopyrrolopyrrole and thienopyrroledione, with a rather deep LUMO estimated at −4.2 eV, shows increased photoconductance when blended with a perfluoroalkyl fullerene C60(CF3)2 as compared to the standard PC61BM. We attribute the change in increased free carrier generation to the higher electron affinity of C60(CF3)2 that is more appropriately matched with the deeper LUMO of the polymer.