Hydrophilic polyurethane acrylate and its physical property for efficient fabrication of organic photovoltaic cells via stamping transfer

• Hydrophilic HEMA-PUA is newly designed for stamping transfer of BHJ film without FOTS treatment.
• Energy release rate of HEMA-PUA between PEDOT:PSS and BHJ are decreased due to modifying surface energy.
• Stamping transferred BHJ exhibits the comparable device performance compared to spin-coating.
• Physical phenomena of stamping transferred BHJ is proved by the analysis of FT-IR, UV–Vis, Nyquist plot, and AFM.
• Stamping process based on transfer film will be expected to promising method in eco-friendly device fabrication.

Recently, stamping transfer process using by soft mold or film has been considered by promising technology to solve the drawbacks of spin coating such as deposition of large area and specific region, reducing the material loss, and multi-staking device structures. For the previous researches, polyurethane acrylate (PUA) stamp was essentially treated the 1H, 1H, 2H, 2H-Perfluorooctyltrichlorosilane (FOTS) for self-assembled monolayer (SAM) onto the Si wafer to modify surface energy. Because the FOTS is known as corrosive material, it is necessary to develop the intrinsic property of PUA with environment friendly. In this research, we investigates non-FOTS based PUA stamping transfer and the different surface energy properties that result in various physical phenomena when used for organic photovoltaics. To transfer the material, the energy release rate (G) between the PUA and the coated material should be smaller than the G between the coated material and the substrate. As a result, hydrophilic PUA was used to reduce the interaction between the PUA and the organic bulk heterojunction (BHJ) layer to transfer the BHJ layer from the PUA stamp to a PEDOT:PSS-coated ITO-substrate. 2-Hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) is included as the reactive diluent to reduce the PUA viscosity, and the contact angle was measured to compare the surface property between the reference PUA and the HEMA-PUA. The stamping-transferred BHJ device exhibits a 95% relative efficiency (2.9%) when compared to that obtained when using a spin-coating process, which is considered as a good alternative to fabricate optoelectronic devices. More importantly, we have found a decrease in the fill factor (64%–58%) and a comparable performance (3.0%–2.9%) derived from the increase in the charge recombination and resistance during the stamping transfer.

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