Among the next generation solar cells, in particular organic photovoltaics are gaining impact as a promising alternative to conventional silicon-based solar cells. However, despite big achievements in the last years, it remains an unresolved challenge to fabricate large-area organic solar cells without sacrificing efficiencies. The reason behind is that basic understanding is still very limited due to the complexity of the systems. Moreover, presently a substantial number of researchers use spin-coating for film fabrication, which is not compatible with the needs of a large scale production. Thus, using up-scalable fabrication methods such as printing are of immanent interest.<br/>In the present work, we use multi-modal grazing incidence small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS and GIWAXS) studies in situ during printing of donor:acceptor blends to gain fundamental understanding about the underlying film formation processes. Different examples of polymer donors and small molecule acceptors are presented and the resulting morphologies are correlated with solar cell device performance. From these data, models about the morphology evolution are extracted and these models guide the fundamental understanding to increase reproducibility in the solar cell fabrication. In particular, more environmental friendly solvents are demonstrated to enable also high efficiency organic solar cells if the printing parameters are tuned with the understanding of the film morphology.

Structure control during <i>in situ</i> printing of donor-acceptor blend films for organic solar cells

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Structure control during in situ printing of donor-acceptor blend films for organic solar cells