Enhancement of Performance and Mechanism Studies of All-Solution Processed Small-Molecule based Solar Cells with an Inverted Structure

Abstract

Both solution-processed polymers and small molecule based solar cells have achieved PCEs over 9% with the conventional device structure. However, for the practical applications of photovoltaic technology, further enhancement of both device performance and stability are urgently required, particularly for the inverted structure devices, since this architecture will probably be most promising for the possible coming commercialization. In this work, we have fabricated both conventional and inverted structure devices using the same small molecular donor/acceptor materials and compared the performance of both device structures, and found that the inverted structure based device gave significantly improved performance, the highest PCE so far for inverted structure based device using small molecules as the donor. Furthermore, the inverted device shows a remarkable stability with almost no obvious degradation after three months. Systematic device physics and charge generation dynamics studies, including optical simulation, light-intensity-dependent current–voltage experiments, photocurrent density-effective voltage analyses, transient absorption measurements, and electrical simulations, indicate that the significantly enhanced performance using inverted device is ascribed to the increasing of <i>J</i>_sc compared to the conventional device, which in turn is mainly attributed to the increased absorption of photons in the active layers, rather than the reduced nongeminate recombination