UC Santa Barbara

Organic photovoltaics have received a large amount of attention in recent years due to their potential for relatively low cost fabrication, light weight and flexible devices, and because of their high solubility, inkjet printing and roll-to-roll processing. Thanks to the new development of novel materials and methods for controlling self-assembly, organic photovoltaics have achieved over 10% efficiencies. One issue that has received relatively little attention is the types of solvents used for processing, mainly their toxicity and sustainability. Recently we discovered the use of a green solvent, 2-MeTHF, from which to process the semiconducting layer. Here we further investigate the feasibility of using 2-MeTHF as a processing solvent for a wide array of molecular donors by device fabrication, electrical and morphological characterization. We also investigated the processing of two novel non-fullerene acceptors from 2-MeTHF, and characterized their morphologies and evaluated their efficiencies.