Highly Crystalline Low Band Gap Polymer Based on Thieno[3,4-c]pyrrole-4,6-dione for High-Performance Polymer Solar Cells with a >400 nm Thick Active Layer

Two thieno[3,4-c]pyrrole-4,6-dione (TPD)-based copolymers combined with 2,2'-bithiophene (BT) or (E)-2-(2-(thiophen-2-yl)vinyl)thiophene (TV) have been designed and synthesized to investigate the effect of the introduction of a vinylene group in the polymer backbone on the optical, electrochemical, and photovoltaic properties of the polymers. Although both polymers have shown similar optical band gaps and frontier energy levels, regardless of the introduction of vinylene bridge, the introduction of a π-extended vinylene group in the polymer backbone substantially enhances the charge transport characteristics of the resulting polymer due to its strong tendency to self-assemble and thus to enhance the crystallinity. An analysis on charge recombination in the active layer of a solar cell device indicates that the outstanding charge transport (μ = 1.90 cm(2)·V(-1)·s(-1)) of PTVTPD with a vinylene group effectively suppresses the bimolecular recombination, leading to a high power conversion efficiency (PCE) up to 7.16%, which is 20% higher than that (5.98%) of the counterpart polymer without a vinylene group (PBTTPD). More importantly, PTVTPD-based devices do not show a large variation of photovoltaic performance with the active layer thickness; that is, the PCE remains at 6% as the active layer thickness increases up to 450 nm, demonstrating that the PTVTPD-based solar cell is very compatible with industrial processing.