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Material insights and challenges for non-fullerene organic solar cells based on small molecular acceptors

Abstract

The field of non-fullerene organic solar cells has experienced rapid development during the past few years, mainly driven by the development of novel non-fullerene acceptors and matching donor semiconductors. However, organic solar cell material development has progressed via a trial-and-error approach with limited understanding of the materials’ structure–property relationships and the underlying device physics of non-fullerene devices. In addition, the availability of hundreds of donor and acceptor semiconductors creates an extremely large pool of possible donor–acceptor combinations, which poses a daunting challenge for rational material screening and matching. This Review describes several important conceptual aspects of the emerging non-fullerene devices by highlighting key contributions that provided fundamental insights regarding rational material design, donor–acceptor pair matching, blend morphology control and the reduced voltage losses in non-fullerene organic solar cells. We also discuss the key challenges that need to be addressed to develop more-efficient non-fullerene organic solar cells.

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Fig. 1: The voltage loss of solar cells.
Fig. 2: PDI-based non-fullerene small molecular acceptors.
Fig. 3: IDT-based non-fullerene small molecular acceptors.
Fig. 4: SubPc-based non-fullerene small molecular acceptors for vacuum-deposited OSCs.
Fig. 5: Comparisons between pure/crystalline and impure/amorphous domains in BHJ blends.
Fig. 6: Morphology control using donor polymers with temperature-dependent aggregation.
Fig. 7: Burn-in losses of fullerene and non-fullerene OSCs.

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Acknowledgements

H.Y. and J.Z. acknowledge financial support from the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program; 2013CB834705), the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (T23–407/13-N, N_HKUST623/13, and 606012), the National Science Foundation of China (#21374090) and the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC-CNERC14SC01). A.F. acknowledges the US National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers program through the Northwestern University Materials Research Center (grant DMR-1121262) and US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant FA9550-15-1-0044) for financial support. X.G. acknowledges financial support from National Science Foundation of China (51573076), Shenzhen Peacock Plan project (KQTD20140630110339343) and South University of Science and Technology of China (FRG-SUSTC1501A-72).

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Zhang, J., Tan, H.S., Guo, X. et al. Material insights and challenges for non-fullerene organic solar cells based on small molecular acceptors. Nat Energy 3, 720–731 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0181-5

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