The growing concern about climate change is pushing the global community towards greener solutions to cut down the greenhouse gases emissions. As such, producing energy from sustainable sources becomes mandatory to achieve the net zero emissions goal by 2050, as set by the United Nations.
Solar panels offer the possibility to generate power from light harvesting, but it’s the use of organic materials that offers great advantages in terms of functionality and life-cycle. In particular, organic semiconductors properties such as their tunable colours, lightweight, flexibility, and semi-transparency enable the use of Organic Photovoltaics (OPV) in building façades and contribute to the realisation of Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB). However, the OPV scalability to terawatts of installed capacity is still non competitive with respect to its cost when compared to the conventional inorganic silicon-based technologies. One of the reasons is the lower performance achieved by the state-of-the-art OPV devices, whose active layer
(the film where the light is absorbed and converted into free charges, electrons and holes, i.e. electricity) is typically composed of a blend made of an electron donor material (conjugated polymer) and a smaller compound as electron acceptor (Non-Fullerene Acceptor, NFA). A crucial factor determining the low performance of OPVs made with NFAs is related to their poor charge transport properties (e.g. low electron mobility and high recombination), which are intimately related to how these molecules are arranged in the solid film, i.e. their molecular organisation.
Great progress was made in the field of organic electronics to obtain higher mobility by understanding the crystalline behaviour of organic molecules from their single crystals, and using these knowledge in the design of new compounds with the desired properties.
At the beginning of this thesis project, little was known about the solid-state organisation of NFAs as very few single crystal structures were disclosed. For these reasons, we were first dedicated to the study of the intrinsic propensity of NFAs to crystallise by growing single crystals. At this fundamental level, we found that the NFA packing geometry is strongly affecting the isotropy of the charge transport, and potentially the electron mobility. On a following step, we developed a methodology to track the NFA packing geometry as we move from ideal systems (single crystals)
to the most complex scenario of the solar cell active layer films, which include a donor and an acceptor (NFA) component. We discovered that NFAs generally tracks their packing motif from single crystals to blend films, and we quantified the benefit of using crystalline compounds with specific packing geometry in terms of electron mobility. Interestingly, we also found that these motifs are not necessary to obtain high performance in organic solar cells as the efficiency is mostly driven by charge recombination and domain purity, rather than electron mobility.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:90713 |
| Date | 22 April 2024 |
| Creators | Mondelli, Pierluigi |
| Contributors | Deibel, Carsten, Morse, Graham, Technische Universität Chemnitz |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 10.1039/c9mh01439j, 10.48550/arXiv.2301.00214, 10.1039/D1TA07822D |
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