Multiple Cases of Efficient Nonfullerene Ternary Organic Solar Cells Enabled by an Effective Morphology Control Method

Ternary organic solar cells (OSCs) have attracted much research attention, as they can maintain the simplicity of the single-junction device architecture while broadening the absorption range of OSCs. However, one main challenge that limits the development of ternary OSCs is the difficulty in controlling the morphology of ternary OSCs. In this paper, an effective approach to control the morphology is presented that leads to multiple cases of efficient nonfullerene ternary OSCs with efficiencies of up to 11.2%. This approach is based on a donor polymer with strong temperature dependent aggregation properties processed from hot solutions without any solvent additives and a pair of small molecular acceptors (SMAs) that have similar surface tensions and thus low propensity to form discrete phases. Such a ternary blend exhibits a simplified bulk-heterojunction morphology that is similar to the morphology of previously reported binary blends. As a result, an almost linear relationship between V_OC and film composition is observed for all nonfullerene ternary devices. Meanwhile, by carefully designing a control system with a large interfacial tension, a different phase separation and V_OC dependence is demonstrated. This morphology control approach can be applicable to more material systems and accelerates the development of the ternary OSC field.