Using volatile additives to alter the morphology and performance of active layers in thin-film molecular photovoltaic devices incorporating bulk heterojunctions
Thin-film photovoltaic devices composed of polymers or small molecules have an exciting future as sources of renewable energy because they can be made in large sizes on flexible surfaces by inexpensive techniques of fabrication. Significant progress in developing new molecular photovoltaic materials...
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| Published in | Chemical Society reviews Vol. 42; no. 23; pp. 915 - 9126 |
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| Main Authors | , |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
England
07.12.2013
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| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
| ISSN | 0306-0012 1460-4744 1460-4744 |
| DOI | 10.1039/c3cs35447d |
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| Summary: | Thin-film photovoltaic devices composed of polymers or small molecules have an exciting future as sources of renewable energy because they can be made in large sizes on flexible surfaces by inexpensive techniques of fabrication. Significant progress in developing new molecular photovoltaic materials and device architectures has been achieved in the last decade. The identity of molecular components in active layers and their individual optoelectronic properties obviously help determine the properties of devices; in addition, however, the behavior of devices depends critically on the nature of the local organization of the components. Recent studies have shown that the morphology of active layers can be tuned by adjusting various parameters, including the solvent used to cast the layer, thermal annealing, and special processing additives. In this review, we summarize the effect of volatile additives on the nanoscale morphology of molecular blends, and we show how these effects can improve the performance of devices. Although we focus on the behavior of mixtures of the type used in current molecular thin-film photovoltaic devices, the subject of our review will interest researchers in all areas of science and technology requiring materials in which separate phases must form intimate long-lived intermixtures with defined structures.
Active layers in molecular devices such as thin-film solar cells can be made more efficient by casting them from solvents containing small amounts of special processing additives that exert subtle effects on nanomorphology. |
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| Bibliography: | Minh Trung Dang obtained his master's degree in chemistry from the Université du Maine (Le Mans, France) in 2006. He then completed his PhD in 2009 at the Université Bordeaux 1, where he studied molecular photovoltaic cells under the joint supervision of Lionel Hirsch and Guillaume Wantz. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Montréal, where he is working with Jim Wuest to develop bulk heterojunction cells containing novel polymeric compounds and small molecules. Jim Wuest received his AB in 1969 from Cornell University and his PhD in 1973 from Harvard University, where he was a student of R. B. Woodward. After serving as an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard, he moved to the Université de Montréal in 1981. His work uses tools from a wide range of disciplines, including synthesis, structural chemistry, surface science, and computation, to develop guidelines for controlling molecular organization in materials. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 0306-0012 1460-4744 1460-4744 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/c3cs35447d |