Controlled phase separation for efficient energy conversion in dye/polymer blend bulk heterojunction photovoltaic cells

Abstract Low-cost photovoltaic energy conversion using conjugated polymers has achieved great improvement due to the invention of organic bulk heterojunction, in which the nanoscale phase separation of electron donor and acceptor favors realizing efficient charge separation and collection. We investigated the polymer photovoltaic cells using N, N′-bis(1-ethylpropyl)-3,4,9,10-perylene bis(tetracarboxyl diimide)/poly(3-hexyl thiophene) blend as an active layer. It is found that processing conditions for the blend films have major effects on its morphology and hence the energy conversion efficiency of the resulting devices. By optimizing the processing conditions, the sizes of donor/acceptor phase separation can be adjusted for realizing efficient charge separation and collection. The overall energy conversion efficiency of the photovoltaic cell processed with optimized conditions increases by nearly 40% compared to the normally spin-coated and annealed cell.