Novel cost-effective acceptor:P3HT based organic solar cells exhibiting the highest ever reported industrial readiness factor

Abstract

Solution-based organic solar cells (OSCs) offer great potential prospects within low-cost electricity production. High-performance materials are traditionally low bandgap polymers requiring a multitude of synthetic steps, limiting the scalability of the materials. A very scalable polymer is poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) which has recently reached a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 6.4% with a non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) O-IDTBR, herein we present four novel simplified NFA analogues to O-IDTBR for reducing the synthetic complexity. The best performing material combination reached an average efficiency of 5.39%, which led to an industrial readiness factor (i-FOM) of 0.26 which is more than a 30% increase compared to that for P3HT:O-IDTBR. Due to the promise of this material combination, upscaling to large area/ITO-free slot-die coating was conducted reaching an optimized PCE of 3.58%.