Morphology optimization via side chain engineering enables all-polymer solar cells with excellent fill factor and stability

All-polymer solar cells (all-PSCs) composed of conjugated polymers as both donor and acceptor components in bulk heterojunction photoactive layers have attracted increasing attention. However, it is a big challenge to achieve optimal morphology in polymer:polymer blends. In response, we report herein a new strategy to adjust the nanoscale organization for all-PSCs. Specifically, side chain engineering of the well-known naphthalene diimide (NDI)-based polymer N2200 is modulated by introducing a fraction of linear oligoethylene oxide (OE) side chains to replace branched alkyl chains on the NDI units and by synthesizing a series of NDI-based polymer acceptors NOEx, where x is the percentage of OE chain substituted NDI units relative to total NDI units. Compared to the reference polymer NOE0, OE-chain-containing polymer NOE10 offers a much higher power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 8.1% with a record high fill factor (FF) of 0.75 in all-PSCs. Moreover, the NOE10-based all-PSC exhibits excellent long-term and thermal stabilities with >97% of the initial PCE being maintained after 300 h of aging at 65 °C. This work demonstrates an effective morphology optimization strategy to achieve highly efficient and stable all-PSCs and shows the excellent potential of NOE10 as an alternative to commercially available acceptor polymers N2200.