The field of non-fullerene organic solar cells has experienced rapid development during the past few years, mainly driven by the development of novel non-fullerene acceptors and matching donor semiconductors. However, organic solar cell material development has progressed via a trial-and-error approach with limited understanding of the materials’ structure–property relationships and the underlying device physics of non-fullerene devices. In addition, the availability of hundreds of donor and acceptor semiconductors creates an extremely large pool of possible donor–acceptor combinations, which poses a daunting challenge for rational material screening and matching. This Review describes several important conceptual aspects of the emerging non-fullerene devices by highlighting key contributions that provided fundamental insights regarding rational material design, donor–acceptor pair matching, blend morphology control and the reduced voltage losses in non-fullerene organic solar cells. We also discuss the key challenges that need to be addressed to develop more-efficient non-fullerene organic solar cells.

在过去的几年中，非富勒烯有机太阳能电池领域经历了快速的发展，这主要是由新型非富勒烯受体和匹配的供体半导体的发展所推动的。但是，有机太阳能电池材料的开发通过反复试验的方法取得了进展，但对材料的结构-性能关系以及非富勒烯器件的基本器件物理的了解有限。此外，数百种施主和受主半导体的可用性创造了大量可能的施主与受主组合，这对合理的材料筛选和匹配提出了严峻的挑战。这篇综述通过突出关键的贡献描述了新兴的非富勒烯装置的几个重要概念方面，这些主要贡献提供了有关合理的材料设计，供体-受体对匹配，共混物形态控制以及非富勒烯有机太阳能电池降低的电压损失的基本见解。我们还将讨论开发更高效的非富勒烯有机太阳能电池需要解决的关键挑战。