Printing and Coating Techniques for Scalable Organic Photovoltaic Fabrication.

Within recent years, there has been an increased interest towards organic photovoltaics (OPVs), especially with their significant device performance reaching beyond 19% since 2022. With these advances in the device performance of laboratory-scaled OPVs, there has also been more attention directed towards using printing and coating methods that are compatible with large-scale fabrication. Though large-area (>100 cm) OPVs have reached an efficiency of 15%, this is still behind that of laboratory-scale OPVs.

Modification of the Surface Composition of PTB7-Th: ITIC Blend Using an Additive.

We investigated the effect of adding -anisaldehyde (AA) solvent to the ink containing poly[[2,60-4,8-di(5-ethylhexylthienyl)benzo[1,2-b:3,3-b]dithiophene][3-fluoro-2[(2-ethylhexyl)carbonyl]thieno[3,4-b]thiophenediyl]](PTB7-Th) and 3,9-bis(2-methylene-(3-(1,1-dicyanomethylene)-indanone))-5,5,11,11-tetrakis(4-hexylphenyl)-dithieno[2,3-d:20,30-d0]-s-indaceno[1,2-b:5,6-b0]-dithiophene(ITIC) on the morphology of the active layer. The present study focuses on determining the effect of the additive on the compositions at the surface of the PTB7-Th: ITIC composite and its morphology, forming one side of the interface of the blend with the MoO electrode, and the influence of the structural change on the performance of devices. Studies of device performance show that the addition of the additive AA leads to an improvement in device performance.