High performance conjugated terpolymers as electron donors in nonfullerene organic solar cells

We demonstrate the synthesis of three π-conjugated terpolymers based on the nonconventional molecular design strategy D1–D2–D1–A comprising two different multi-fused ladder-type arene electron donating moieties [(4,4′-bis(2-ethylhexyl)dithieno[3,2-b:2′,3′-d]silole)-2,6-diyl (DTS) as D1 and thienyl-substituted benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b′]dithiophene (BDT) derivatives as D2] and an electron withdrawing unit [5,6-difluoro-2,1,3-benzothiadiazole (DFBT) as A]. The implementation of these materials as electron donors is explored in high performance near infrared non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) organic solar cells utilizing the benchmark low bandgap NFA IEICO-4F. The triple bulk heterojunction blend systems provide the basis for a detailed structure–property–performance relationship in terms of BDT's thienyl substitution (alkyl, alkylthio and fluoro) by investigating the correlations between the molecular energy level alignments, performance, and device physics of OSCs. The alkylthienyl-BDT based π-conjugated terpolymer [P(DTS-BDT-DFBT)] exhibits the best photovoltaic performance delivering a power conversion efficiency of 10% with a high short circuit current density of 22.7 mA cm−2. The combination of optoelectronic measurements and morphological analyses revealed the suppression of field dependent charge recombination in P(DTS-BDT-DFBT):IEICO-4F as compared to alkylthiothienyl-BDT [P(DTS-BDTS-DFBT):IEICO-4F] and fluoro-substituted thienyl-BDT [P(DTS-BDTF-DFBT):IEICO-4F] based OSC devices.