Large-scale roll-to-roll printed, flexible and stable organic bulk heterojunction photodetector

• Published in: Npj flexible electronics 2018-03, Vol.2 (1), p.1-8, Article 7
• Main Authors: Tong, Sichao, Yuan, Jun, Zhang, Chujun, Wang, Chunhua, Liu, Baoxing, Shen, Jianqiang, Xia, Huayan, Zou, Yingping, Xie, Haipeng, Sun, Jia, Xiao, Si, He, Jun, Gao, Yongli, Yang, Junliang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 639/301/1005; 639/766/1130/2798; Bending; Biomonitoring; Broadband; Butyric acid; Chemistry and Materials Science; Commercialization; Dark current; Electronic devices; Electronics and Microelectronics; Gravure; Heterojunctions; Homogeneity; Instrumentation; Materials Science; Optical and Electronic Materials; Optoelectronic devices; Photoelectric effect; Photoelectric emission; Photometers; Photovoltaic cells; Polyethylene terephthalate; Polymer Sciences; Printing; Quinoxalines; Reliability; Reproducibility; Solar cells; Stability; Substrates; Wearable technology
• ISSN: 2397-4621; 2397-4621
• DOI: 10.1038/s41528-017-0020-y

A flexible and stable photodetector shows great potential applications in intelligent wearable devices, health monitoring, and biological sensing. The high-output fabrication of flexible and stable photodetector via the large-scale printing process would accelerate its commercialization. Herein, a high performance, flexible organic bulk heterojunction (BHJ) photodetector with good stability is designed and fabricated via a large-scale roll-to-roll (R2R) micro-gravure printing technique on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or paper substrate, in which the organic BHJ active layer is structured with [6,6]-phenyl C 61 butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) and a donor–acceptor copolymer, i.e., employing 4,8-bis(2-ethylhexylthiophene) benzo[1,2- b ;3,4-b′] dithiophene (BDTT) as the donor unit and 5,8-bis(5-thiophen-2-yl)-6,7-difluoro-2,3-bis(4-ethylhexyloxy-1- mata -luorophenyl) quinoxaline ( ff Qx) as the acceptor unit (PBDTT- ff Qx). The PBDTT- ff Qx/PCBM BHJ photodetector shows a broad photoresponse in ultraviolet and visible light, a high detectivity ( D* ) value up to 6.19 × 10 11 Jones, and an excellent I photo / I dark as high as 5.6 × 10 2 . It exhibits excellent flexibility and stability. Its performance parameters could maintain over 80% of original values after bending 10,000 cycles or exposing in ambient condition (humidity ~50%, temperature ~30 °C) for 50 days without any encapsulation. More importantly, the R2R micro-gravure printed PBDTT- ff Qx/PCBM BHJ active layer is great homogeneous, and the responsivity ( R ) values of photodetector arrays show a very narrow distribution. The research results show that a high-performance PBDTT- ff Qx/PCBM BHJ photodetector with well reliability and reproducibility can be fabricated via the R2R micro-gravure printing technique, which provides an available strategy for fabricating large-area and flexible electronic and optoelectronic devices. R2R printing: organic devices closer to commercialization Roll-to-roll printing is getting close to the large-scale fabrication of reliable and stable state-of-the-art organic optoelectronic devices. A collaborative team led by Junliang Yang from Central South University, China presents roll-to-roll (R2R) micro-gravure printing method to fabricate high performance and highly stable organic photodetectors on PET or paper substrates in large scale. They find that the bulk heterojunction structure of PBDTT- ff Qx/PCBM, a well-known system for organic solar cell, also works as a hi