Abstract

With performance improvements, organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are an increasingly competitive technology for renewable energy. However, most high-performance OPVs are small-area devices processed from toxic halogenated solvents via spin-coating, posing a challenge for mass production. We study a low-cost polymer donor (PTQ10) and a non-fullerene acceptor (DTY6) in a halogen-free solvent using industrially relevant blade coating.

The non-inverted architecture performed best, achieving 12% efficiency, with the blade-coating deposition surpassing spin-coating. Active layers processed from the two coating techniques exhibited similar exciton quenching, likely due to the same measured nanodomain size and purity. However, blade-coated devices exhibited a higher charge carrier lifetime correlated with increased acceptor pi-stacking despite decreased donor pi-stacking.

This suggests that optimizing crystallinity in blade-coated devices could result in even higher performance. Additionally, high performance in upscaled blade-coated devices (1 cm²) processed in air with a green solvent demonstrated the industrial potential of this system.