Controlling the Morphology of Polymer and Fullerene Blends in Organic Photovoltaics Through Sequential Processing and Self-Assembly

TL;DRAbstract

Organic photovoltaics are a potential source for cheap renewable energy. However oneof the main limitations to the field thus far has been scalability. Power conversionefficiencies of photovoltaic films made on the laboratory scale of a couple of mm2can be as high as 10%. However when the device area is increased to even tens of mm2power conversion efficiency plummets. This work presented in this dissertation focuseson understanding and circumventing the issues limiting the expansion of photovoltaicprocessing to larger device areas.One method of maintaining photovoltaic efficiency over a large range of device areasis to use self-assembling materials to control the active layer morphology. Thesematerials should give the preferred morphology regardless of substrate size. I first studyphotovoltaic devices utilizing self-assembling fullerenes designed to form nanometerscale wires within the film active layer. I show that fullerene that are able to form these nano-wires give a higher device

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