Joule
Volume 4, Issue 7, 15 July 2020, Pages 1486-1500
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Article
High-Efficiency Indoor Organic Photovoltaics with a Band-Aligned Interlayer

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.05.010Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • The choice of ETL is the key to achieving the high performance of indoor OPV

  • A deep HOMO ETL can reduce leakage current and trap-assisted recombination

  • The device with PDI-NO can achieve a record PCE of 31% under 3,000 K LED condition

Context & Scale

The emergence of indoor electronic devices for internet of things (IoT) has motivated the scientific community to develop photovoltaic devices that can efficiently convert indoor light into electricity. In this work, we report high-efficiency non-fullerene organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells with over 30% power conversion efficiency (PCE) in indoor conditions. Our results show that the choice of electron-transporting layer (ETL) is important to enable such performance. The use of an ETL (named PDI-NO) with a deep highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) level can effectively suppress leakage current and reduce trap-assisted recombination of the devices. Thus, using this ETL, we achieve record PCE of 31% by utilizing a low-band-gap acceptor in the bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) blend. Whereas, in another case, by employing a large-band-gap acceptor, a PCE of 26.7% with over 1V is achieved. Our study paves the way toward high-performance indoor OPV devices for powering IoT electronics.

Summary

The emergence of indoor electronic devices for internet of things (IoT) has motivated the scientific community to develop photovoltaic devices that can efficiently convert indoor light into electricity. In this paper, we report high-efficiency non-fullerene organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells with over 30% power conversion efficiency (PCE) under indoor conditions. Our results show that the choice of electron-transporting layer (ETL) is critically important to enable such performance. The use of an ETL (named PDI-NO) with a deep highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) level can effectively suppress leakage current and reduce trap-assisted recombination of the devices. Thus, using this ETL, we achieve record PCE of 31% by utilizing a low-band-gap acceptor in the bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) blend. Whereas, in another case, by employing a large-band-gap acceptor, a PCE of 26.7% with over 1V is achieved. Our study paves the way toward high-performance indoor OPV devices for powering IoT electronics.

Keywords

organic solar cell
OSC
indoor solar cell
indoor organic solar cell
high efficiency OPV
internet of things
IoT
electron transport interlayer
ETL
polymer solar cells

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6

These authors contributed equally

7

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