Journal article

Tailoring exciton diffusion and domain size in photovoltaic small molecules by annealing

MT Sajjad, Y Zhang, PB Geraghty, VD Mitchell, A Ruseckas, O Blaszczyk, DJ Jones, IDW Samuel

Journal of Materials Chemistry C | ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY | Published : 2019

Abstract

Exciton diffusion is an important part of light harvesting in organic photovoltaics (OPVs) because it enables excitons to reach the interface between donor and acceptor and contribute to the photocurrent. Here we used simple and cost-effective techniques of thermal annealing and solvent vapour annealing to increase the exciton diffusion coefficient and exciton diffusion length in two liquid crystalline electron donor materials BQR and BTR. We found that the three-dimensional exciton diffusion length increased to ∼40 nm upon annealing in both materials. Grazing-incidence wide angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS) measurements show an increase of crystallite size to ∼37 nm in both materials after th..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Australian Renewable Energy Agency


Funding Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from the European Research Council (grant 321305). We are grateful to EPSRC for equipment grant (EP/L017008/1) and for support of OB (EP/M508214/1). This work was made possible by support from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency which funds the project grants within the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (AUSIAPV/ACAP). Responsibility for the views, information or advice expressed herein is not accepted by the Australian Government. We acknowledge the SAXS/WAXS beamline at the Australian Synchrotron. The research data supporting this publication can be accessed at 10.17630/10fd3801-b282-42c9-b672-750f8d1bb635.