Simultaneous Improvement in Short Circuit Current, Open Circuit Voltage, and Fill Factor of Polymer Solar Cells through Ternary Strategy

We present a smart strategy to simultaneously increase the short circuit current (J(sc)), the open circuit voltage (V-oc), and the fill factor (FF) of polymer solar cells (PSCs). A two-dimensional conjugated small molecule photovoltaic material (SMPV1), as the second electron donor, was doped into the blend system of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and [6,6]-phenyl-C71-butyric acid methyl (PC71BM) to form ternary PSCs. The ternary PSCs with 5 wt % SMPV1 doping ratio in donors achieve 4.06% champion power conversion efficiency (PCE), corresponding to about 21.2% enhancement compared with the 3.35% PCE of P3HT:PC71BM-based PSCs. The underlying mechanism on performance improvement of ternary PSCs can be summarized as (i) harvesting more photons in the longer wavelength region to increase J(sc); (ii) obtaining the lower mixed highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) energy level by incorporating SMPV1 to increase V-oc; (iii) forming the better charge carrier transport channels through the cascade energy level structure and optimizing phase separation of donor/acceptor materials to increase J(sc) and FF.