Morphology-insensitive Performance Facilitates Transition from Spin-Coating to Roll-to-Roll Coating For High-Performance, Solution-Processed Solar Cells

Published

August 2, 2016

Author(s)

Lee J. Richter, Jonathan Downing, Sebastian Engmann, Hyun W. Ro, Andrew A. Herzing, Dean M. DeLongchamp, Subhrangsu Mukherjee, Harald Ade, Maged Addelsamie, Aram Amassian, Yuhang Liu, He Yan

Abstract

Solution processing via roll-to-roll (R2R) coating promises a low cost, low thermal-budget, sustainable revolution for the production of solar cells. Yet virtually all high performance solution processed research cells have been demonstrated by spin-coating, a deposition process incompatible with volume manufacturing. We present detailed device and morphology studies of an organic photovoltaic system deposited by a volume manufacturing compatible technique, blade- coating, that achieves excellent performance, > 9.5 % PCE. Remarkably, we find that significant aspects of the film morphology: average crystal domain orientation and characteristic phase separation length distribution are significantly different when deposited by blade-coating vs spin-coating. We posit that diversity in the morphology that supports high performance may be a characteristic of manufacturable systems that can be coated thick (greater than 200 nm ). We confirm that blade-coating is a valuable prototyping technique for R2R coating by demonstrating nominally identical morphologies for both piece blade-coating and continuous-web, slot-die coating.

Citation

Energy and Environmental Science

Volume

9

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1039/C6EE01623E

Keywords

polymer, solar cell, processing, manufacturing, real-time, x-ray scattering

Citation

Richter, L. , Downing, J. , Engmann, S. , Ro, H. , Herzing, A. , DeLongchamp, D. , Mukherjee, S. , Ade, H. , Addelsamie, M. , Amassian, A. , Liu, Y. and Yan, H. (2016), Morphology-insensitive Performance Facilitates Transition from Spin-Coating to Roll-to-Roll Coating For High-Performance, Solution-Processed Solar Cells, Energy and Environmental Science, [online], https://doi.org/10.1039/C6EE01623E (Accessed April 20, 2024)