A General Approach for Lab-to-Manufacturing Translation on Flexible Organic Solar Cells

The blossoming of organic solar cells (OSCs) has triggered enormous commercial applications, due to their high-efficiency, light weight, and flexibility. However, the lab-to-manufacturing translation of the praisable performance from lab-scale devices to industrial-scale modules is still the Achilles' heel of OSCs. In fact, it is urgent to explore the mechanism of morphological evolution in the bulk heterojunction (BHJ) with different coating/printing methods. Here, a general approach to upscale flexible organic photovoltaics to module scale without obvious efficiency loss is demonstrated. The shear impulse during the coating/printing process is first applied to control the morphology evolution of the BHJ layer for both fullerene and nonfullerene acceptor systems. A quantitative transformation factor of shear impulse between slot-die printing and spin-coating is detected. Compelling results of morphological evolution, molecular stacking, and coarse-grained molecular simulation verify the validity of the impulse translation. Accordingly, the efficiency of flexible devices via slot-die printing achieves 9.10% for PTB7-Th:PC₇₁BM and 9.77% for PBDB-T:ITIC based on 1.04 cm². Furthermore, 15 cm² flexible modules with effective efficiency up to 7.58% (PTB7-Th:PC₇₁BM) and 8.90% (PBDB-T:ITIC) are demonstrated with satisfying mechanical flexibility and operating stability. More importantly, this work outlines the shear impulse translation for organic printing electronics.