Device fabrication and material design for high performance organic photovoltaics based on non-fullerene acceptors with bulky flanking side-chains

It is known that organic solar cell (OSC) is a promising photovoltaic technology due to the intrinsic advantages of organic materials, including mechanical flexibility, environmental friendliness and compatibility with roll-to-roll printing. Due to recent progress in small molecular acceptors (SMAs), OSC field has moved on to non-fullerene stage and the power conversion efficiency has been achieved over 18% based on Y-series acceptors. Since the photovoltaic performance of OSCs is influenced significantly by the chemical structure of materials, chemical modifications are helpful to further explore the potential of materials, among which side-chain engineering is demonstrated as an effective strategy to manipulate material properties. In this thesis, I will mainly focus on device fabrica...[ Read more ]