Designing Simple Conjugated Polymers for Scalable and Efficient Organic Solar Cells.

Conjugated polymers have a long history of exploration and use in organic solar cells, and over the last twenty-five  years, marked increases in the solar cell efficiency have been achieved. However, the synthetic complexity of these materials has also drastically increased, which makes the scalability of the highest efficiency materials difficult. If we are able to design conjugated polymers which can exhibit both high efficiency and straightforward synthesis, the road to commercial reality would be more achievable. For that reason, we designed a new synthetic approach towards PTQ10. Our new synthetic approach to make PTQ10 has a significant reduction in cost (1/7 th the original) and is also able to easily accommodate different side chains to move towards green processing solvents. Furthermore, high efficiency organic solar cells are demonstrated with a PTQ10:Y6 blend exhibiting ~15% efficiency.