No Cover Image

Journal article 1141 views 267 downloads

The role of fullerenes in the environmental stability of polymer:fullerene solar cells

Harrison Lee, Andrew M. Telford, Jason A. Röhr, Mark Wyatt Orcid Logo, Beth Rice, Jiaying Wu, Alexandre de Castro Maciel, Sachetan M. Tuladhar, Emily Speller, James McGettrick Orcid Logo, Justin Searle Orcid Logo, Sebastian Pont Orcid Logo, Trystan Watson Orcid Logo, Thomas Kirchartz Orcid Logo, James Durrant Orcid Logo, Wing Chung Tsoi Orcid Logo, Jenny Nelson Orcid Logo, Zhe Li Orcid Logo

Energy & Environmental Science, Volume: 11, Issue: 2, Pages: 417 - 428

Swansea University Authors: Harrison Lee, Mark Wyatt Orcid Logo, Emily Speller, James McGettrick Orcid Logo, Justin Searle Orcid Logo, Trystan Watson Orcid Logo, James Durrant Orcid Logo, Wing Chung Tsoi Orcid Logo, Jenny Nelson Orcid Logo, Zhe Li Orcid Logo

Check full text

DOI (Published version): 10.1039/c7ee02983g

Abstract

Environmental stability is a common challenge for the commercialisation of low cost, encapsulation-free organic opto-electronic devices. Understanding the role of materials degradation is the key to address this challenge, but most such studies have been limited to conjugated polymers. Here we quant...

Full description

Published in: Energy & Environmental Science
ISSN: 1754-5692 1754-5706
Published: Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) 2018
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa38000
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Abstract: Environmental stability is a common challenge for the commercialisation of low cost, encapsulation-free organic opto-electronic devices. Understanding the role of materials degradation is the key to address this challenge, but most such studies have been limited to conjugated polymers. Here we quantitatively study the role of the common fullerene derivative PCBM in limiting the stability of benchmark organic solar cells, showing that a minor fraction (<1%) of photo-oxidised PCBM, induced by short exposure to either solar or ambient laboratory lighting conditions in air, consistent with typical processing and operating conditions, is sufficient to compromise device performance severely. We identify the effects of photo-oxidation of PCBM on its chemical structure, and connect this to specific changes in its electronic structure, which significantly alter the electron transport and recombination kinetics. The effect of photo-oxidation on device current–voltage characteristics, electron mobility and density of states could all be explained with the same model of photoinduced defects acting as trap states. Our results demonstrate that the photochemical instability of PCBM and chemically similar fullerenes remains a barrier for the commercialisation of organic opto-electronic devices.
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Issue: 2
Start Page: 417
End Page: 428