Ternary Polymer Solar Cells Facilitating Improved Efficiency and Stability

The use of a ternary active layer offers a promising approach to enhance the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of polymer solar cells (PSCs) via simply incorporating a third component. Here, a ternary PSC with improved efficiency and stability facilitated by a new small molecule IBC-F is demonstrated. Even though the PBDB-T:IBC-F-based device gives an extremely low PCE of only 0.21%, a remarkable PCE of 15.06% can be realized in the ternary device based on PBDB-T:IE4F-S:IBC-F with 20% IBC-F, which is ≈10% greater than that (PCE = 13.70%) of the control binary device based on PBDB-T:IE4F-S. The improvement in the device performance of the ternary PSC is mainly attributed to the enhancement of fill factor, which is due to the improved charge dissociation and extraction, suppressed bimolecular and trap-assisted recombination, longer charge-carrier lifetime, and enhanced intermolecular interactions for preferential face-on orientation. Additionally, the ternary device with 20% IBC-F shows better thermal and photoinduced stability over the control binary device. This work provides a new angle to develop the third components for building ternary PSCs with enhanced photovoltaic performance and stability for practical applications.