Improve the Performance of the All-Small-Molecule Nonfullerene Organic Solar Cells through Enhancing the Crystallinity of Acceptors

Significant development has been achieved in nonfullerene organic solar cells. However, most of the high-efficiency nonfullerene systems are composed of polymer donors and fused-ring acceptors, and only a few small molecule donors can work well. Herein, a new A–D–A small molecule donor named NDTSR with naphtho[1,2-b:5,6-b′]dithiophene (NDT) as building blocks is synthesized. Two energy levels well-matched fused-ring acceptors ITIC and IDIC are chosen to construct all-small-molecule solar cells with NDTSR, respectively. When mixed with IDIC, a high power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 8.05% is achieved, which is the highest efficiency for NDT-based small molecule donor. However, the NDTSR:ITIC system only exhibits a low PCE of 1.77%. The big difference in the performance of these two systems should be attributed to the different morphology and phase separation resulting from the crystallinity and aggregation ability of the acceptors. The results demonstrate that NDT-based small molecule is a promising candidate donor for all-small-molecule systems, while the crystallinity of fused-ring acceptors is a critical factor for optimizing the phase separation in the active layer.