Publication date: 17th February 2025
Polymer solar cells (PSCs) have become a promising technology for sustainable energy harvesting due to their flexibility, low cost, and potential for large-scale applications. The development of non-fullerene acceptors has enabled PSCs to achieve a power conversion efficiency exceeding 20%, highlighting the excellent industrial potential of this emerging solar technology. However, despite these efficiency gains, the long-term stability of PSCs remains a significant challenge that hinders their commercial viability.
We has been recently working on the intrinsic degradation mechanisms of polymer solar cells under light, heat and electric field stress. Especially, we recently demonstrated that unexpected interfacial degradation at the photoactive layer/MoO3 interface is responsible for the thermal degradation of polymer:non-fullerene solar cells.[1-3] By proper interfacial protection of the anode interfaces, the cells showed an excellent thermal stability under 85 °C or even 150 °C thermal annealing.[2-3] Our findings underscore the effectiveness of our approach and provide valuable insights for the design of more stable polymer solar cells.
Reference:
Qin, X.; Yu, X.; Li, Z.; Fang, J.; Yan, L.; Wu, N.; Nyman, M.; Österbacka, R.; Huang, R.; Li, Z.; et al. Thermal-Induced Performance Decay of the State-of-the-Art Polymer: Non-Fullerene Solar Cells and the Method of Suppression. Molecules 2023, 28 (19), 6856.
Yu, X.; Wu, N.; Österbacka, R.; Ma, C.-Q. et al. Unexpected anode interfacial reaction lowering the performance of organic solar cells upon thermal annealing and method for suppression, manuscript under submission
Xi, Q.; Qin, J.; Wu, N.; Österbacka, R.; Ma, C.-Q. et al. Thermal Stability Improvement of Inverted Organic Solar Cells by Mitigating the Undesired MoO3 Diffusion Towards Cathode with a High-Ionization Potential Interface Layer, manuscript under submission
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China 22075315 and Chinese Academy of Science No. YJKYYQ20180029.