Fabrication of N,N′-dioctyl-3,4,9,10-perylenedicarboximide nanostructures through solvent influenced π–π stacking and their morphological impact on photovoltaic performance

• PTCDI-C8 nanostructures are formed with solvent treatment over a thin film.
• Solvents are interacting with the molecular stacks to form nanostructures.
• The nanostructure architectures influence the overall solar cell performance.
• The vertical nanostructure based device showed the best efficiency among them.

We report the fabrication of N,N′-dioctyl-3,4,9,10-perylenedicarboximide (PTCDI-C8) nanostructures with solvent treatment over PTCDI-C8 thin films. With four different solvent treatments (methanol, acetone, chlorobenzene, chloroform), four different types of nanostructures were formed. The structural, chemical and physical properties of the nanostructures have been investigated. Moreover, the PTCDI-C8 nanostructures were used as the n-type material in an inverted organic solar cell with a conjugated polymer as the p-type material. The effects of different nanostructures on the performance of the organic solar cell have been studied. The study shows that donor/acceptor interfacial architecture plays an important role in the solar cell performance. Vertical nanostructures formed with methanol treatment gave the best result among the four devices because of the high donor/acceptor interfacial area. Further, the photoluminescence time decay study indicated better exciton dissociation in the vertical nanostructure based device.