Gradual chlorination at different positions of D-π-A copolymers based on benzodithiophene and isoindigo for organic solar cells

Isoindigo(IID)has been widely used as strong acceptor unit(A)to construct narrow bandgap polymers in organic field effect transistors(OFETs)and organic solar cells(OSCs).Combing with IID,we chose benzodithiophene(BDT)as the donor unit(D)and thieno[3,2-b]thiophene(TT)as theπbridge to construct a new type of D-π-A polymer PE70.Based on PE70,we adopt the chlorination strategy to fine-tune photoelectric characteristics and film morphology,and then developed PE74 and PE75.By blending with non-fullerene acceptor(NFA)Y6,device based on PE74 with chloride substitution on the BDT unit showed increasing photovoltaic performance.In addition,further chlorine substitution on the IID(PE75)would greatly reduce the non-radiative voltage loss(ΔV3),and the distorted molecular conformation also took responsible for the excessive recombination.As results,PE74:Y6-based device achieves a power conversion efficiency(PCE)of 11.06%with open-circuit voltage(VOC)of 0.76 V,which are higher than those of PE70:Y6(PCE of 10.40%and VOC of 0.72 V)and PE75:Y6-based device(PCE of 6.24%and VOC of 0.84 V).This work demonstrates the regularity of the photovoltaic performance caused by chlorination strategy in polymer in the non-fullerene OSC devices,which provide important insights into highperformance photovoltaic materials.

Non-equivalent D-A copolymerization strategy towards highly efficient polymer donor for polymer solar cells

D-A copolymerization is a broadly utilized molecular design strategy to construct high efficiency photovoltaic materials for polymer solar cells(PSCs),and all the D-A copolymer donors reported till now are the alternate D-A copolymers with equal D-and A-units.Here,we first propose a non-equivalent D-A copolymerization strategy with unequal D-and A-units,and develop three novel non-equivalent D-A copolymer donors(PM6-D1,PM6-D2 and PM6-D3 with D/A unit ratio of 1.1:0.9,1.2:0.8 and1.3:0.7,respectively)by inserting more D units into the alternate D-A copolymer PM6 backbone to finely tune the physicochemical and photovoltaic properties of the polymers.The three non-equivalent D-A copolymers show the down-shifted highest occupied molecular orbital(HOMO)energy levels,higher hole mobility,higher degree of molecular self-assembly and higher molecular crystallinity with the increase of D-unit ratio in comparison with the alternate D-A copolymer PM6.As a result,all the three non-equivalent D-A copolymer-based PSCs with Y6 as acceptor achieve improved power conversion efficiency(PCE)with higher V_(oc),larger J_(sc)and higher FF simultaneously.Particularly,the PM6-D1:Y6 based PSC achieved a high PCE of17.71%,which is significantly higher than that(15.82%)of the PM6:Y6 based PSC and is one of the highest performances in the binary PSCs.