Sri Paleti
Ph.D. Candidate supervised by Prof. Derya Baran
Event Location: Engineering Science Hal (Bldg. 9), Lecture Hall 2 (Room 2325)
Zoom Link: https://kaust.zoom.us/j/94730723153
ABSTRACT: The state-of-the-art organic solar cells (OSC) use bulk heterojunction (BHJ) blend architecture in the photo-active layer. The BHJ is formed by finely mixing polymer donor and small molecule acceptor, which was predominantly fullerene derivatives until the last five years. But, the emergence of non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) materials has been the viable alternative to overcome high synthetic costs, limited optical absorption, and poor bandgap tunability of fullerene-based acceptors. These unique properties of NFA has resulted in a rapid improvement of OSC efficiency and opened doors for wide variety of applications including building integrated photovoltaics, green houses and agrivoltaics. Despite these advantages, the shorter device lifetime under light and heat is a major concern for their commercialization. This dissertation is focused on improving poor photo- and thermal stability of high efficiency OSC based on the widely used NFA, ITIC and Y-series derivatives. The light-induced changes in the acceptor molecular structure and the active layer nanostructure results in the photo-induced traps in photo-aged devices. The selective addition of third component to the active layer impedes the changes in the active layer nanostructure and suppress trap formation.
Under constant thermal stress, the growth of acceptor crystals results increases the trap-assisted recombination in thermally aged devices. Similar to photo-stability the selective addition of third or more component/s arrests the crystal growth either by altering the enthalpic or entropic interactions among the molecules. The results suggest that the fabricated hexenary and ternary OSC display a superior thermal stability than the binary devices. In addition, the hexenary devices displayed thickness independent thermal stability, which is essential for the active layer thermal stability printed via high throughput techniques.