POLYMER NETWORK ORGANIC SOLAR CELLS

Abstract

Solar is crucial to human sustainability and organic solar cells (OSC) will aid in our transition. To move away from halogenated solvent processing, I will demonstrate a fabrication technique that allows a halogen solvent optimized donor:acceptor photoactive layer system to be used with green solvents, while also providing a stabilized morphology over composition of the film. I will establish how the surface donor:acceptor composition affects the open-circuit voltage of the OSC, which is fundamentally a creeping up of density-of-states of the pinning of the Fermi level. Lastly, with a technique of creating a polymer donor matrix, and then infiltrated with acceptors, I will show that by having a pre-existing polymer donor matrix network, the precipitation of a non-fullerene acceptor inside this matrix allows it to template onto the matrix, effectively creating a dual percolating network morphology that is much more resilient than the typical OSC bulk heterojunction morphology.