Environmentally friendly and roll-processed flexible organic solar cells based on PM6:Y6.

Organic Solar Cells (OSCs) have reached the highest efficiencies using lab-scale on active areas far below 0.1 cm2. This tends to widen the so-called “lab-to-fab gap”, which is one of the most important challenges to make OSCs competitive. The most commonly used fabrication technique is spin-coating, which has poor compatibility with large-scale techniques and substantial material waste. Moreover, other techniques such as blade or slot-die coating are much more suitable for roll-to-roll manufacturing processes, which is one of the advantages the technology has compared, for example, to silicon solar cells. However, only a few studies report solar cells using these fabrication techniques. Additionally, for the environmentally friendly OSC scale-up, inks based on non-hazardous solvent systems are needed. In this work, slot-die coating has been chosen to coat the PM6:Y6 active layer, using o-xylene, a green solvent, without additives. The optimal coating parameters are defined through fine-tuning of the coating parameters, such as the drying temperature and solution concentration. Moreover, ternary devices with PCBM, and fully printed devices are also fabricated. Power conversion efficiencies of 6.26% and 7.16% are achieved for binary PM6:Y6 and ternary PM6:Y6:PCBM devices, respectively.