Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV14)
Publication date: 1st March 2014
Organic photovoltaic (OPVs) cells are viewed as one of the most promising candidates for low cost solar cells because of the possibility of a simple and cheap production on flexible and large area substrates.1 The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of polymer solar cells has improved rapidly from below 1% to over 9% in the past 16 years.2 The main contribution to this progress was made by the molecular engineering of new conjugated polymers and small molecules (as the donor materials), assisted by limited successes in derivatizing the fullerenes (PC60BM or PC70BM as the electron acceptor). The most critical challenges in developing ideal donor materials are to design and synthesize conjugated polymers with (1) appropriate solubility and miscibility to achieve an optimal blend with PCBM in the active layer, (2) strong absorption ability and narrow optical band gap to harvest more solar photon for a thin active layer, (3) well matched HOMO – LUMO energy levels between polymer and PCBM to ensure a good charge separation and high open circuit voltage (Voc) and (4) high hole mobility.3 Amongst all the strategies used to tentatively reach these desired properties, the combination of the electron-rich (donor) and electron-deficient (acceptor) groups as repeating units, forming internal donor-acceptor (D-A) structures, have been widely used for developing low band gap semi-conducting materials.4 it is still a challenge to develop an ideal low-band-gap copolymer by a judicious choice of the donor-acceptor combination. Different D-A small molecules and copolymers with fluorinated isoindigo as the strong acceptor and oligothiophene as the donor have been designed and synthesized for solution-processed bulk-heterojunction solar cells. Interesting PCEs were achieved by improving the short-circuit current density without sacrificing the high open-circuit voltage and fill factor through the strategy of fluorinated isoindigo incorporating in D-A small molecules and polymers for OPVs.
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