A Thiazole-Based Polymer Donor for Efficient Organic Solar Cells

Ye Xu; Huifeng Yao; Tao Zhang; Lijiao Ma; Jianhui Hou

doi:10.1007/s12209-022-00319-w

Transactions of Tianjin University ›› 2022, Vol. 28 ›› Issue (5) : 398 -405. DOI: 10.1007/s12209-022-00319-w

Research Article

A Thiazole-Based Polymer Donor for Efficient Organic Solar Cells

Ye Xu ¹^,²
, Huifeng Yao ¹^,^b
, Tao Zhang ¹^,²
, Lijiao Ma ¹
, Jianhui Hou ¹^,²^,^e

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¹ State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190, Beijing, China

² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, China

^b yaohf@iccas.ac.cn

^e hjhzlz@iccas.ac.cn

Huifeng Yao received his PhD from the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2017), in the group of Prof. Jianhui Hou, studying the molecular design and application of organic photovoltaic materials. He received support from the National Science Fund of China for Excellent Young Scholars in 2022. At present, he has been promoted as an associate researcher in the institute, working on developing feasible molecular strategies for designing highly efficient organic photovoltaic materials. His current research interest is establishing rational relationships among molecular structure, aggregation behavior, and photoelectronic performance for organic conjugated systems.

Jianhui Hou is a professor at ICCAS since 2010 and an adjunct professor at University of Science and Technology Beijing since 2012. He received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from ICCAS in 2006. Then he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in University of California, Los Angeles from 2006 to 2008 and then worked as Director of Research of Solarmer Energy Inc. from 2008 to 2010. His group currently focuses on the design, synthesis, and application of photoelectric materials.

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Abstract

The development of new materials plays a critical role in improving the efficiency of organic solar cells (OSCs). At present, the relatively high-lying highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) level of the high-efficiency polymer donor is regarded as one of the main reasons for the low open-circuit voltage (V _oc). In this work, we introduced the strong electron-withdrawing thiazole unit into the construction of a polymer donor. We designed and prepared an alternating donor–acceptor material, namely PSZ, by copolymerizing 4-methyl thiazole with an electron-donating benzodithiophene unit and studied its application in high-efficiency OSCs. The optical and electrical properties of the new material were characterized by UV–Vis absorption spectroscopy and electrochemical cyclic voltammetry. Results show that PSZ is a typical wide-bandgap material with a high optical bandgap of 2.0 eV and a deep HOMO level of − 5.70 eV. When a non-fullerene BTP-eC9 was selected as the acceptor material, V _oc reached 0.88 V in the resulting device, and the corresponding power conversion efficiency (PCE) was 8.15%. In addition, when PSZ was added as the third component to the binary photoactive combination with PBDB-TF as the donor and BTP-eC9 as the acceptor, V _oc of the cell device could be increased, thereby obtaining a high PCE of 17.4%. These results indicated that introducing thiazole units into polymer donors can remarkably reduce the HOMO levels and improve V _oc and PCE in OSCs.

Keywords

Organic solar cells / Energy conversion efficiency / Polymer donor / Thiazole unit

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Ye Xu, Huifeng Yao, Tao Zhang, Lijiao Ma, Jianhui Hou. A Thiazole-Based Polymer Donor for Efficient Organic Solar Cells. Transactions of Tianjin University, 2022, 28(5): 398-405 DOI:10.1007/s12209-022-00319-w

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