Challenges to the Success of Commercial Organic Photovoltaic Products

Abstract

Recent advances in the development of organic photovoltaic (OPV) materials has led to significant improvements in device performance; now closing in on the 20% efficiency threshold. Despite these improvements in performance, the commercial viability of organic photovoltaic products remains elusive. In this perspective, the current limitations of high performing blends are uncovered, particularly focusing on the industrial upscaling considerations of these materials, such as synthetic scalability, active layer processing, and device stability. Moreover, a simplified metric, namely, the scalability factor (SF), is introduced to evaluate the scale‐up potential of specific OPV materials and blends thereof. Of the most popular molecular design strategies investigated in recent times, it is found that the use of Y‐series nonfullerene acceptors (NFAs) and synthetically simple materials, such as PTQ‐10 and ternary blends, are most effective at maximizing the efficiency without negatively impacting the SF. Furthermore, the improvements that are needed, in terms of device processability and stability, are considered for industrial scale‐up and final product application. Finally, an outlook of organic photovoltaics is provided both from a perspective of important research avenues and applications that can be exploited.

Accelerating organic solar cell material's discovery: high-throughput screening and big data

“… 46 Similarly, Po et al explored the synthetic complexity (SC) of active layer donor polymers 47 and NFAs, 48 while Moser et al introduced a simplified metric termed as scalability factor (SF) accounting for the semiconductor synthetic cost. 49 Based on our cost analysis, close to 50% of the overall device cost is solely ascribed to the obtainment of the raw semiconducting materials (see Table S1 in the ESI † ), which highlights the importance of identifying both high performing and ‘ click-synthetized’ molecular candidates. In general, the device cost is proportional to the total number of synthetic steps required by each of the organic semiconductors employed, which is affected as well by their synthetic yield.…”

“… 50 In this regard, the donor polymer known as PTQ10 has emerged as a very cost-effective counterpart for upscaling due to its great balance between synthetic cost and performance (PCE/SF = 0.53) when blended with NFAs from the Y-series. 49 On the other hand, state-of-the-art low bandgap polymers including PBDB-T and their halogenated derivatives do not exceed the PCE/SF threshold of 0.4. According to this report, ternary blends including low SF semiconductors (such as P3HT) are prominent alternatives from the economic perspective since they have as high PCE/SF values as the PTQ10-based devices.…”

Healing the degradable organic–inorganic heterointerface for highly efficient and stable organic solar cells

“…Although the rapid progress being made for OSCs in recent years, [1][2][3][4] with the power conversion efficiency (PCE) surpassing 18%, [5][6][7][8][9] efforts are still needed to push OSCs toward the practical relevance. 10,11 There are great demands for the development of high-performance and low-cost photovoltaic materials, [12][13][14] yet being rare. Inorganic metal oxides (MOs) can potentially be scaled up with low costs, such as zinc oxides (ZnOs), which have been employed in OSCs as electron transport layers (ETLs).…”

Incorporation of a Guaiacol‐Based Small Molecule Guest Donor Enables Efficient Nonfullerene Acceptor‐Based Ternary Organic Solar Cells

“…[24][25][26][27][28][29] Semitransparent solar cells for building integrated photovoltaic technology, [30] green house applications, [31][32][33] and the technologies are at the edge to commercialization. [34] Despite great achievements made in recent years on OSCs, the insufficient photon harvesting is still a limitation to the PCE improvement in the single BHJ (combination of one D and one A) OSCs due to the intrinsically narrow absorption window of organic materials. To improve the photon harvesting of the active layer, the ternary OSCs [35][36][37][38][39][40] and tandem OSCs [41,42] have been successfully used.…”