Design and application of volatilizable solid additives in non-fullerene organic solar cells

Most of the high-performance organic solar cells are fabricated with the assistance of high-boiling-point solvent additives to optimize their charge transport properties; this has adverse effects on the OSCs’ stability and reproducibility in large-scale production. Here, we design volatilizable solid additives by considering the molecular structure feature of an acceptor–donor–acceptor-type non-fullerene acceptor. The application of solid additives can enhance the intermolecular π–π stacking of the non-fullerene acceptor and thus facilitate the charge transport properties in the active layers, leading to improved efficiencies of OSCs. Importantly, devices fabricated using volatilizable solid additives exhibit higher stability and reproducibility when compared with the OSCs processed with solvent additives. Our results not only demonstrate an approach of applying volatilizable solid additives to benefit the large-scale production of OSCs but also provide a potential direction for designing specific solid additives for different active layers. High-boiling-point solvent additives are commonly used to optimize the device performance of organic solar cells but they make problems for device stability and reproducibility. Here Yu et al. design volatilizable solid additives that can improve the device performance without causing above issues.