Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV16)
Publication date: 28th March 2016
Bulk heterojunction structure organic solar cells (OSCs) have received very much attention because of their unique advantage of solution processability and mechanical flexibility. So far OSCs using a polymer donor and fullerene derivative acceptor have achieved power conversion efficiency (PCE) over 12%. It has been reported that number-average molecular weight (Mn) of polymers has great influence on OSCs’ performance, leading to batch-to-batch devices’ performance variations. In our previous report, we investigated the effects of Mn of our newly synthesized low bandgap polymer, PDTBT-TT, on OSCs’ performance. We found that OSCs based on higher Mn PDTBT-TT had higher PCE of 6.71% but the solubility of PDTBT-TT in o-dichlorobenzene decreased with increasing Mn thus leading to rougher active layer surface and higher series resistance. To overcome this problem, we further modified the chemical structure of PDTBT-TT to get a new copolymer, polymer 1. Polymer 1 and PDTBT-TT have similar Mn but polymer 1 has higher solubility because of larger dihedral angles. After applying polymer 1 into OSCs, the highest PCE of 7.45% was obtained from the optimized device. The open circuit voltage (Voc) of OSCs based on polymer 1 was 0.81 V while the Voc of OSCs based on PDTBT-TT was only 0.70 V. These findings are helpful for designing new high- performance polymers for OSCs.