A New Model for the Morphology of P3HT/PCBM Organic Photovoltaics from Small-Angle Neutron Scattering: Rivers and Streams

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) have attracted increasing interest as a lightweight, low-cost, and easy to process replacement for inorganic solar cells. Moreover, the morphology of the OPV active layer is crucial to its performance, where a bicontinuous, interconnected, phase-separated morphology of pure electron donor and acceptor phases is currently believed to be optimal. In this work, we use neutron scattering to investigate the morphology of a model OPV conjugated polymer bulk heterojunction, poly[3-hexylthiophene] (P3HT), and surface-functionalized fullerene 1-(3-methyloxycarbonyl) propyl(1-phenyl [6,6]) C(61) (PCBM). These results show that P3HT and PCBM form a homogeneous structure containing crystalline P3HT and an amorphous P3HT/PCBM matrix, up to ca. 20 vol % PCBM. At 50 vol % PCBM, the samples exhibit a complex structure containing at least P3HT crystals, PCBM crystals, and a homogeneous mixture of the two. The 20 vol % PCBM samples exhibit behavior consistent with the onset of phase separation after 6 h of thermal annealing at 150 °C, but appear to be miscible at shorter annealing times. This suggests that the miscibility limit of PCBM in P3HT is near 20%. Moreover, for the 50 vol % PCBM sample, the interface roughens under thermal annealing possibly owing to the growth of PCBM crystals. These observations suggest a different morphology than is commonly presented in the literature for optimal bulk heterojunctions. We propose a novel "rivers and streams" morphology to describe this system, which is consistent with these scattering results and previously reported photovoltaic functionality of P3HT/PCBM bulk heterojunctions.