TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ran, Niva A.
A1  - Love, John A.
A1  - Heiber, Michael C.
A1  - Jiao, Xuechen
A1  - Hughes, Michael P.
A1  - Karki, Akchheta
A1  - Wang, Ming
A1  - Brus, Viktor V.
A1  - Wang, Hengbin
A1  - Neher, Dieter
A1  - Ade, Harald
A1  - Bazan, Guillermo C.
A1  - Thuc-Quyen Nguyen, 
T1  - Charge generation and recombination in an organic solar cell with low energetic offsets
JF  - dvanced energy materials
N2  - Organic bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells require energetic offsets between the donor and acceptor to obtain high short-circuit currents (J(SC)) and fill factors (FF). However, it is necessary to reduce the energetic offsets to achieve high open-circuit voltages (V-OC). Recently, reports have highlighted BHJ blends that are pushing at the accepted limits of energetic offsets necessary for high efficiency. Unfortunately, most of these BHJs have modest FF values. How the energetic offset impacts the solar cell characteristics thus remains poorly understood. Here, a comprehensive characterization of the losses in a polymer:fullerene BHJ blend, PIPCP:phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PC61BM), that achieves a high V-OC (0.9 V) with very low energy losses (E-loss = 0.52 eV) from the energy of absorbed photons, a respectable J(SC) (13 mA cm(-2)), but a limited FF (54%) is reported. Despite the low energetic offset, the system does not suffer from field-dependent generation and instead it is characterized by very fast nongeminate recombination and the presence of shallow traps. The charge-carrier losses are attributed to suboptimal morphology due to high miscibility between PIPCP and PC61BM. These results hold promise that given the appropriate morphology, the J(SC), V-OC, and FF can all be improved, even with very low energetic offsets.
KW  - energetic offset
KW  - fill factor
KW  - morphology
KW  - organic solar cells
KW  - recombination
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1002/aenm.201701073
SN  - 1614-6832
SN  - 1614-6840
VL  - 8
IS  - 5
PB  - Wiley-VCH
CY  - Weinheim
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Roland, Steffen
A1  - Yan, Liang
A1  - Zhang, Qianqian
A1  - Jiao, Xuechen
A1  - Hunt, Adrian
A1  - Ghasemi, Masoud
A1  - Ade, Harald
A1  - You, Wei
A1  - Neher, Dieter
T1  - Charge Generation and Mobility-Limited Performance of Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cells with a Higher Adduct Fullerene
JF  - The journal of physical chemistry : C, Nanomaterials and interfaces
N2  - Alternative electron acceptors are being actively explored in order to advance the development of bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) organic solar cells (OSCs). The indene-C-60 bisadduct (ICBA) has been regarded as a promising candidate, as it provides high open-circuit voltage in BHJ solar cells; however, the photovoltaic performance of such ICBA-based devices is often inferior when compared to cells with the omnipresent PCBM electron acceptor. Here, by pairing the high performance polymer (FTAZ) as the donor with either PCBM or ICBA as the acceptor, we explore the physical mechanism behind the reduced performance of the ICBA-based device. Time delayed collection field (TDCF) experiments reveal reduced, yet field-independent free charge generation in the FTAZ:ICBA system, explaining the overall lower photocurrent in its cells. Through the analysis of the photoluminescence, photogeneration, and electroluminescence, we find that the lower generation efficiency is neither caused by inefficient exciton splitting, nor do we find evidence for significant energy back-transfer from the CT state to singlet excitons. In fact, the increase in open circuit voltage when replacing PCBM by ICBA is entirely caused by the increase in the CT energy, related to the shift in the LUMO energy, while changes in the radiative and nonradiative recombination losses are nearly absent. On the other hand, space charge limited current (SCLC) and bias-assisted charge extraction (BACE) measurements consistently reveal a severely lower electron mobilitiy in the FTAZ:ICBA blend. Studies of the blends with resonant soft X-ray scattering (R-SoXS), grazing incident wide-angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS), and scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) reveal very little differences in the mesoscopic morphology but significantly less nanoscale molecular ordering of the fullerene domains in the ICBA based blends, which we propose as the main cause for the lower generation efficiency and smaller electron mobility. Calculations of the JV curves with an analytical model, using measured values, show good agreement with the experimentally determined JV characteristics, proving that these devices suffer from slow carrier extraction, resulting in significant bimolecular recombination losses. Therefore, this study highlights the importance of high charge carrier mobility for newly synthesized acceptor materials, in addition to having suitable energy levels.
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b02288
SN  - 1932-7447
VL  - 121
SP  - 10305
EP  - 10316
PB  - American Chemical Society
CY  - Washington
ER  -