Rhodanine-based nonfullerene acceptors for organic solar cells

Abstract

Significant progress on the development of nonfullerene acceptors (NFAs) for organic solar cells (OSCs) has been made in the past several years, and the power conversion efficiency (PCE) exceeding 17% has been already realized based on a tandem non-fullerene device. To date, NFAs with a linearly fused acceptor-donor-acceptor (A-D-A) structure are of great interest, due to their attracting synthetic flexibility and high photovoltaic performance. Rhodanine is one of the most studied electron-withdrawing moieties to construct such A-D-A type NFAs, and the resulting single-junction OSCs have produced PCEs of ∼10%. More interestingly, those rhodanine-based NFAs have demonstrated a particularly excellent compatibility with well-known P3HT donor, enabling respectable PCEs over 7%. Thus in this review, we summarize the important advances on rhodanine-based NFAs with a main focus on discussing the molecular design strategies, providing a better understanding of the structure-property relationship for those rhodanine-based NFAs.