The development of nanoscale morphology in polymer: fullerene photovoltaic blends during solvent casting

Wang, Tao, Dunbar, Alan D. F., Staniec, Paul A., Pearson, Andrew J., Hopkinson, Paul E., Macdonald, John Emyr ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5504-1692, Lilliu, Samuele, Pizzey, Claire, Terrill, Nicholas J., Donald, Athene M., Ryan, Anthony J., Jones, Richard A. L. and Lidzey, David G. 2010. The development of nanoscale morphology in polymer: fullerene photovoltaic blends during solvent casting. Soft Matter 6 (17) , pp. 4128-4134. 10.1039/c0sm00343c

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Abstract

The power conversion efficiency in a conjugated polymer-functionalized fullerene bulk heterojunction organic photovoltaic (OPV) device is dependent both on the electronic properties of the constituent materials and on the nanoscale morphology of the active semiconductor layer thin-film. Here we use in situ ellipsometry and grazing incidence X-ray scattering (GI-XS) to study molecular self-organization in poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and [6,6]-phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) blend films in real time, during the drying process as they are cast from solution. We illustrate the evolution of the extinction coefficient from a solution to a solid, semi-crystalline state. We show that once the solvent fraction in the film falls below 50%, the P3HT undergoes rapid crystallization via heterogeneous nucleation; a process that is complete in seconds. We also evidence a rapid, dynamic self-annealing process that reduces the characteristic lamella spacing in the P3HT crystallites. The mechanistic understanding of film-formation demonstrated here is an important component in optimizing deposition processes suitable for large-area OPV manufacture.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Subjects:	Q Science > QC Physics
Publisher:	RSC
ISSN:	1744-683X
Last Modified:	19 Oct 2022 09:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/19973

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