Séminaire - 23/05/2023 - Sylvain Chambon - Organic photovoltaic solar cells from waterborne dispersions: fine tuning of the nanoparticles morphology for high efficiency devices
Invitation : Judikaël LE ROUZO (Département DETECT, Equipe LUMEN-PV).
Diffusion : IM2NP, CINaM, Irphe, LP3 (via N. Sannier), Madirel (via P. Boulet), PIIM (via T. Angot), CPT (T. Martin), Fédération de Chimie (via S. Viel), CP2M
SEMINAIRE Mardi 23 mai 2023 à 14h00
Salle des séminaires de l'Im2np, campus de Saint-Jérôme, 1er étage Bâtiment Poincaré
Sylvain Chambon
IMS UMR 5218, Bordeaux, France
Organic photovoltaic solar cells from waterborne dispersions: fine tuning of the nanoparticles morphology for high efficiency devices
In the last years, the different developments in organic photovoltaic (OPV) lead to the rapid improvement of the power conversion efficiencies (PCE), up to 19% in single junction solar cells.1 OPV technology present several advantages such as low energy payback time, light weight, flexibility and transparency which makes it highly attractive for building-integration PV, nomad and indoor applications. However, one of the drawbacks of OPV is the high toxicity of the solvents used to process the active layer which are mainly aromatic and/or chlorinated. In order to make this PV technology more environmentally friendly, it would be desirable to change the toxic organic solvents by water.2
During this talk, I will present our recent results in the development of water-based organic semiconductor colloidal inks for OPV. In the first part, I will show the different strategies we have been developing to control the size and the morphology during the nanoparticle synthesis. In particular, we have been studying the influence of the surface energies of the donor and acceptor materials on the morphology of composite NPs which were studied using synchrotron-based STXM.3 In a second part, I will present some devices and techniques we have been developing to characterize the opto-electronic properties of the nanoparticles. Finally, in the last part, I will demonstrate the impact of the internal morphology of the NPs on the performances of OPV devices fabricated from water based dispersion. PTQ10:Y6 donor/acceptor system was specifically selected due to low interfacial energy between the donor and the acceptor materials. As a result, a NP-based active layer with optimal intermixed morphology was achieved and high efficiency devices with up to 9.98% PCE were fabricated, a record for OPV solar cells fabricated from water-based inks without additives. This greener way to process OPV leads to 85% of the performance obtain with control devices prepared with organic solvents.4 This work highlights the potentially of using water-based colloidal inks as more environmentally friendly route for organic photovoltaics as well as organic electronics in general.
Figure 1: (a) J-V characteristics of PTQ10:Y6 OPV (b) EQE of PTQ10:Y6 OPV prepared from water-based dispersion and organic solution.
(c) Device architecture of water-based OPV devices (d) Compositional mapping and schematic representation of PTQ10:Y6 BHJ made from water
1 Y. Cui, Y. Xu, H. Yao, P. Bi, L. Hong, et al., Adv. Mater. 2021, 33, 2102420.
2 A. Holmes, E. Deniau, C. Lartigau-Dagron, A. Bousquet, S. Chambon, et al., ACS Nano 2021, 15, 3927.
3 M. G. Barr, S. Chambon, A. Fahy, T. W. Jones, M. A. Marcus, et al., Mater. Chem. Front. 2021, 5, 2218.
4 H. Laval, A. Holmes, M. A. Marcus, B. Watts, G. Bonfante, et al., Adv. Energy Mater. 2023, accepted, DOI : 10.1002/aenm.202300249
