Issue 5, 2017

The marriage of AIE and interface engineering: convenient synthesis and enhanced photovoltaic performance

Abstract

As a promising option out of all of the well-recognized candidates that have been developed to solve the coming energy crisis, polymer solar cells (PSCs) are a kind of competitive clean energy source. However, as a convenient and efficient method to improve the efficiency of PSCs, the inherent mechanism of the interfacial modification was still not so clear, and interfacial materials constructed with new units were limited to a large degree. Here we present a new kind of interfacial material consisting of AIE units for the first time, with an efficiency of 8.94% being achieved by inserting TPE-2 as a cathode interlayer. This is a relatively high PCE for PC71BM:PTB7-based conventional PSCs with a single-junction structure. Different measurements, including TEM, AFM, SEM, GIXRD, UPS, SKPM, and SCLC, were conducted to investigate the properties in detail. All of the obtained experimental results confirmed the advantages of the utilization of new interfacial materials with AIE characteristics in polymer solar cells, thus providing an additional choice to develop new organic cathode interfacial layers with high performances.

Graphical abstract: The marriage of AIE and interface engineering: convenient synthesis and enhanced photovoltaic performance

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
23 Dec 2016
Accepted
22 Feb 2017
First published
23 Feb 2017
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2017,8, 3750-3758

The marriage of AIE and interface engineering: convenient synthesis and enhanced photovoltaic performance

C. Wang, Z. Liu, M. Li, Y. Xie, B. Li, S. Wang, S. Xue, Q. Peng, B. Chen, Z. Zhao, Q. Li, Z. Ge and Z. Li, Chem. Sci., 2017, 8, 3750 DOI: 10.1039/C6SC05648B

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements