Publication date: 17th February 2025
Recent progress on organic photovoltaic (OPV) materials has enabled solar cells with impressive power conversion efficiencies exceeding 19% to date at lab scale. However, large area industrial OPV modules are still far behind in terms of performances today. Also, the promise of low-cost for this printed solar cells technology is far from being achieved today. It is important to develop scalable materials, environmentally friendly processed and simplified device structures. Minimizing the number of required layers is one of the key to simplify the OPV module fabrication. In this communication, strategies to suppress charge transport layers, respectively Hole-Transport-Layers (HTL) and/or Electro-Transport-Layers (ETL) will be discussed. For example, we successfully suppressed the need of HTL by simply blending an additional molecule with the bulk heterojunction. Upon mild thermal annealing, the molecules migrates to the silver top electrode to bind with the metal, thus, forming in situ, post-fabrication, the required hole-transport interface. The resulting solar cells shows exceptional thermal stability.