<br/>Based on novel organic semiconductors, organic solar cells are an interesting alternative to conventional silicon based solar cells as they feature new possibilities due to being lightweight, flexible and producible at low costs. Instead of expensive ultra-high vacuum technologies, fabrication can be done in ambient conditions at room temperature, using wet chemical processing. Thereby high-throughput fabrication methods can be used such as roll-to-roll printing or spray coating. As a consequence, the production of these solar cells has the potential to become very cheap and easy. However, so far most research is done on organic solar cells prepared via spin coating and champion devices are achieved via spin coating. Thus, still fundamental knowledge about morphologies being installed during printing needs to be improved to become compatible with spin coated devices.<br/>With in-situ advanced x-ray and neutron scattering methods, the film formation is followed during printing with a very high temporal and spatial resolution. In particular, with in-situ grazing incidence small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS and GIWAXS) studies, we gain information on the kinetics of inner structures of the respective electrodes, blocking layers and active layers of the organic solar cells during processing. From these data, models about the morphology evolution are extracted and these models guide the fundamental understanding of the print process and help in tailoring the key parameters to obtain an improved solar cell performance.

In-situ study of nanostructure formation during printing of films for organic solar cells

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.