Unravelling donor–acceptor film morphologyformation for environmentally-friendly OPV inkformulations

• Published in: Green chemistry : an international journal and green chemistry resource : GC 2019, Vol.21 (18), p.5090
• Main Authors: Holmes, Natalie P., Munday, Holly, Barr, Matthew G., Thomsen, Lars, Marcus, Matthew A., Kilcoyne, A. L. David, Fahy, Adam, van Stam, Jan, Dastoor, Paul C., Moons, Ellen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chemistry; Fysik; Kemi; Physics
• ISSN: 1463-9262; 1463-9270
• DOI: 10.1039/c9gc02288k

The challenge of coating organic photovoltaics (OPV) from green solvents is to achieve the requirednanostructured interpenetrating network of donor and acceptor domains based on a rational choice ofsolvent approach as opposed to the usual trial-and-error methods. We demonstrate here that we canachieve a bicontinuous interpenetrating network with nanoscale phase separation for the chosen donor–acceptor material system poly[2,3-bis-(3-octyloxyphenyl)quinoxaline-5,8-diyl-alt-thiophene-2,5-diyl]:phenyl-C61 butyric acid methyl ester (TQ1:PC61BM) when processing from green solvent ink formulations.This structure is achieved by first calculating the Hansen solubility parameters (HSP) of the donor andacceptor materials, followed by careful choice of solvents with selective relative solubilities for the twomaterials based on the desired order of precipitation necessary for forming a nanostructured interdigitatednetwork morphology. We found that the relative distances in Hansen space (Ra) between TQ1 andthe primary solvent, on the one hand, and PC61BM and the primary solvent, on the other hand, could becorrelated to the donor–acceptor morphology for the formulations based on the solvents d-limonene,anisole, and 2-methyl anisole, as well as the halogenated reference solvent o-dichlorobenzene. Thisnanostructured blend film morphology was characterised with scanning transmission X-ray microscopy(STXM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and the film surface composition was analysed bynear edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectroscopy. Hansen solubility theory, based onsolution thermodynamics, has been used and we propose an HSP-based method that is a general platformfor the rational design of ink formulations for solution-based organic electronics, in particular facilitatingthe green solvent transition of organic photovoltaics. Our results show that the bulk heterojunctionmorphology for a donor–acceptor system processed from customised solvent mixtures can be predictedby the HSP-based method with good reliability.