Toluene Processed All-Polymer Solar Cells with 18% Efficiency and
Enhanced Stability Enabled by Solid Additive: Comparison between
Sequential-Processing and Blend-Casting
Abstract
The emergence of polymerized small molecule acceptors (PSMAs) has
significantly improved the performance of all-polymer solar cells
(all-PSCs). However, the pace of device engineering lacks behind that of
materials development, so that a majority of the PSMAs have not
fulfilled their potentials. Furthermore, most high-performance all-PSCs
rely on the use of chloroform as the processing solvent. For instance,
the recent high-performance PSMA named PJ1-γ, with high LUMO and HOMO
levels, could only achieve a PCE of 16.1% with a high-energy-level
donor (JD40) using chloroform. Herein, we present a methodology
combining sequential processing (SqP) with the addition of 0.5%wt
PC71BM as a solid additive (SA) to achieve an impressive efficiency of
18.0% for all-PSCs processed from toluene, an aromatic hydrocarbon
solvent. Compared to the conventional blend-casting (BC) method whose
best efficiency (16.7%) could only be achieved using chloroform, the
SqP method significantly boosted the device efficiency using toluene as
the processing solvent. In addition, the donor we employ is the classic
PM6 that has deeper energy levels than JD40, which provides low energy
loss for the device. We compare the results with another PSMA (PYF-T-o)
with the same method. Finally, an improved photostability of the SqP
devices with the incorporation of SA is demonstrated.