High-performance organic photovoltaic cells under indoor lighting enabled by suppressing energetic disorders

Summary

Organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells have exhibited great advantages for indoor applications. However, large energetic disorder restricts the performance of OPV cells under low illuminance, which brings significant challenges for indoor applications. Here, we demonstrate that concentrated indoor light can suppress the effects of energetic disorder and simultaneously enhance the open-circuit voltage and fill factor of OPV cells. Remarkably, PB2:FCC-Cl-based cells achieve a state-of-the-art PCE of 33.0% when concentrating indoor light to 20,000 lux. Meanwhile, all OPV cells exhibit superior stability under concentrated indoor light due to mild lighting conditions. Especially for the PBDB-TF:Y6 system exhibiting the best morphological stability, an extrapolated intrinsic lifetime is over 30,000 h. Combined with optical waveguide concentrators, we also reveal that concentrating OPV cells have the potential for low-cost manufacturing. These results suggest that developing concentrating OPV cells is quite necessary for indoor applications in the future.