Revealing the effect of donor/acceptor intermolecular arrangement on organic solar cells performance based on two-dimensional conjugated small molecule as electron donor

•D/A intermolecular arrangement strongly determines OSCs performance.•Large VOC of 1.15 V was obtained for the OSCs based on ICBA as acceptor.•The champion PCE of 7.05% was obtained for the cells with PC71BM as acceptor.

A series of solution processed organic solar cells (OSCs) were fabricated with a two-dimensional conjugated small molecule SMPV1 as electron donor and fullerene derivatives PC71BM or ICBA as electron acceptor. The champion power conversion efficiency (PCE) of OSCs arrives to 7.05% for the cells with PC71BM as electron acceptor. A relatively large open circuit voltage (VOC) of 1.15 V is obtained from cells using ICBA as electron acceptor with an acceptable PCE of 2.54%. The fill factor (FF) of OSCs is 72% or 61% for the cells with PC71BM or ICBA as electron acceptor, which is relatively high value for small molecule OSCs. The relatively low performance of OSCs with ICBA as electron acceptor indicates that ICBA cannot play positive role in photoelectric conversion processes, which is very similar to the phenomenon observed from the OSCs with high efficient narrow band gap polymers other than P3HT as electron donor, the underlying reason is still in debate. The SMPV1 has strong self-assemble ability to form an ordered two dimensional lamellar structure, which provides an effective platform to investigate the effect of electron acceptor chemical structure on the performance of OSCs. Experimental results exhibit that ICBA molecules may prefer to vertical cross-intercalation among side chains of SMPV1, PC71BM molecules may have better miscibility with SMPV1 in the active layer. The different donor/acceptor (D/A) intermolecular arrangement strongly influences photon harvesting, exciton dissociation and charge carrier transport, which may provide a new sight on performance improvement of OSCs by adjusting D/A intermolecular arrangements.

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