Synergism of molecular weight, crystallization and morphology of poly(3-butylthiophene) for photovoltaic applications

A serial of poly(3-butylthiophene) (P3BTs) with molecular weights (MWs) ranged from 7 kDa to 50 kDa is synthesized and characterized. The DSC studies show that the thermal property and crystallinity of P3BT increase with MWs within the range from 7 kDa to 25 kDa, then decrease with further higher MW. The characteristic morphologies of incontinuous crystalline nanofibrils, interconnected nanofibrillar networks, and relative large clusters associate to low, medium and high MW P3BTs, respectively, demonstrate the strong correlation between MW, crystallinity and morphology of P3BT. It is found that the P3BT could be re-considered as the promising candidate for applications in organic optoelectronics if synergism of the crystallinity and morphology could be precisely controlled via tuning molecular weight. The polymer solar cells (PSCs) device based on P3BT with medium MW achieves an attractive power conversion efficiency of 3.5%, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the record for P3BT/PC61BM PSCs and comparable to the well-studied P3HT devices. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved