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Liquid crystalline perylene diimide outperforming nonliquid crystalline counterpart: Higher power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) in bulk heterojunction (BHJ) cells and higher electron mobility in space charge limited current (SCLC) devices

ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, ISSN: 1944-8244, Vol: 5, Issue: 21, Page: 11093-11100
2013
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Article Description

In this work, we propose the application of liquid crystalline acceptors as a potential means to improve the performances of bulk heterojunction (BHJ) organic solar cells. LC-1, a structurally-simple perylene diimide (PDI), has been adopted as a model for thorough investigation. It exhibits a broad temperature range of liquid crystalline (LC) phase from 41 C to 158 C, and its LC properties have been characterized by differental scanning calorimetry (DSC), polarization optical microscopy (POM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The BHJ devices, using P3HT:LC-1 (1:2) as an organic photovoltaic active layer undergoing thermal annealing at 120 C, shows an optimized efficiency of 0.94 %. By contrast, the devices based on PDI-1, a nonliquid crystalline PDI counterpart, only obtain a much lower efficiency of 0.22%. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) images confirm that the active layers composed of P3HT:LC-1 have smooth and ordered morphology. In space charge limited current (SCLC) devices fabricated via a spin-coating technique, LC-1 shows the intrinsic electron mobility of 2.85 × 10 cm/(V s) (at 0.3 MV/cm) which is almost 5 times that of PDI-1 (5.83 × 10 cm/(V s)) under the same conditions for thermal annealing at 120 C. © 2013 American Chemical Society.

Bibliographic Details

Zhang, Youdi; Wang, Helin; Xiao, Yi; Wang, Ligang; Shi, Dequan; Cheng, Chuanhui

American Chemical Society (ACS)

Materials Science

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