Morphological Stability and Performance of Polymer–Fullerene Solar Cells under Thermal Stress: The Impact of Photoinduced PC60BM Oligomerization

Zhe Li

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Publication date

January 2014

DOI

10.1021/nn404687s

Publisher

American Chemical Society (ACS)

ISSN

1936-0851

Citation count (estimate)

Abstract

We report a general light processing strategy for organic solar cells (OSC) that exploits the propensity of the fullerene derivative PC60BM to photo-oligomerize, which is capable of both stabilizing the polymer:PC60BM active layer morphology and enhancing the device stability under thermal annealing. The observations hold for blends of PC60BM with an array of benchmark donor polymer systems, including P3HT, DPP-TT-T, PTB7, and PCDTBT. The morphology and kinetics of the thermally induced PC60BM crystallization within the blend films are investigated as a function of substrate and temperature. PC60BM nucleation rates on SiOx substrates exhibit a pronounced peak profile with temperature, whose maximum is polymer and blend-composition dependent...