journal article·2025-12-10Open access

Resolving Ternary Morphology for High-Performance Thickness-Insensitive Organic Solar Cells

Heng Liu, Yuhao Li, Zhaoyang Nie, Yuang Fu, Zhaozhao Bi, Shengtian Zhu, Lu Chen, Guilong Cai, Pok Fung Chan, Luo Huang, Luhang Xu, Chun-Jen Su, U-Ser Jeng, Guangye Zhang, Fei Huang, Wei Ma, Xian-Kai Chen, Yubin Ke, Man Chung Tang, Xinhui Lu

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces· Volume 17· Issue 49

Abstract

High-performance organic solar cells (OSCs) suffer from low active layer thickness tolerance, which is incompatible with large-scale printing technology originally envisioned for low-cost module manufacturing. Herein, by incorporating a large amount of small-molecule donor BTR-Cl into the prototypical PM6/Y6 blend film, we fabricated efficient ternary devices with a photoconversion efficiency of 17.7% at an active layer thickness of 300 nm, among the best-performing thick-film devices reported so far. To elucidate its morphological origin, we deuterated both Y6 and BTR-Cl to resolve their morphology in ternary blend films separately via grazing-incidence small-angle neutron scattering (GISANS). We observed enhanced short-range aggregation of both Y6 and BTR-Cl within the intermixed domains of the ternary blend film induced by the accelerated molecular assembly process. Those aggregates act as effective bridges between crystalline domains to improve connectivity in both donor and acceptor phases, resulting in enhanced carrier mobility, suppressed space charge accumulation, and consequently significantly improved thickness tolerance in ternary devices. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of combined targeted deuteration and GISANS to resolve the complicated structures within multicomponent OSC active layers and highlights the critical role of amorphous nanomorphology in carrier transport connectivity and, consequently, the thickness tolerance of high-performance OSCs.
Source: openalex_inverted_index · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Organic Electronics and Photovoltaics · Organic Light-Emitting Diodes Research · Thin-Film Transistor Technologies

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Physics

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Spallation Neutron Source Science Center, Institute of High Energy Physics

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Institute of Materials Research, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School

Tsinghua University

State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials

Xi’an Jiaotong University

Institute of Polymer Optoelectronic Materials and Devices, State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials and Devices

South China University of Technology

College of New Materials and New Energies

Shenzhen Technology University

Beijing Key Laboratory of Ionic Liquids Clean Process, CAS Key Laboratory of Green Process and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Complex System, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 1 Zhongguancun North Second Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100190, China

National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, Hsinchu Science Park, Hsinchu 30076, Taiwan

Department of Chemical Engineering

National Tsing Hua University

Institute of Functional Nano & Soft Materials (FUNSOM)

Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Negative Carbon Technologies Soochow University

Funding

Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee · Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Carbon-Based Functional Materials and Devices, Soochow University

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