Tailoring Nanoscale Morphology of Polymer:Fullerene Blends Using Electrostatic Field

• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.6b10870
• Publication Date: 2016-12-05T17:43:07Z
• Authors: Moneim Elshobaki; Ryan Gebhardt; John Carr; William Lindemann; Wenjie Wang; Eric Grieser; Swaminathan Venka...; Evan Ngo; Ujjal Bhattacharjee; Joseph Strzalka; Zhang Jiang; Qiquan Qiao; Jacob Petrich; David Vaknin; Sumit Chaudhary
• Keywords: Morphology

To tailor the nanomorphology in polymer/fullerene blends, we study effect of electrostatic field (E-field) on solidification poly(3-hexylthiophene-2, 5-diyl) (P3HT):[6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PC60BM) bulk heterojunction (BHJ). In addition to control; wet P3HT:PC60BM thin films were exposed E-field Van de Graaff (VDG) generator at three different directions—horizontal (H), tilted (T), and vertical (V)—relative plane substrate. Surface characterizations field-treated BHJs affirmed that fullerene molecules can easily penetrate spaghetti-like P3HT move up down following E-field. Using treatment, achieved favorable morphologies with efficient charge separation, transport, collection. We improve; (1) hole mobility values 19.4 × 10–4 ± 1.6 cm2 V–1 s–1 (2) power conversion efficiency (PCE) conventional inverted OPVs 2.58 0.02% 4.1 0.40%, respectively. This approach serve as a new morphology-tuning technique, which is generally applicable other polymer–fullerene systems.