19.36% Efficiency Organic Solar Cells Based on Low‐Cost Terpolymer Donors with Simple Molecular Structures

Low cost and high performance are key elements for the industrialization of organic solar cells (OSCs). In view of this, developing highly‐efficient organic photovoltaic molecules with simple chemical structure is one of the most effective countermeasures. Herein, three simple‐structure terpolymers PTQ12‐5, PTQ12‐10, and PTQ12‐15 are designed and synthesized, by embedding difluoro‐substituted bithiophene (2T‐2F) unit into the backbone of low‐cost and high‐efficiency polymer PTQ10. The synthesis of three terpolymers contains only two‐step synthetic routes and over 85% synthetic yields from cheap raw compounds, thus exhibiting distinctly low‐cost characteristic. Remarkably, PTQ12‐5 shows significantly higher absorbance coefficient and hole mobility than PTQ10. Consequently, PTQ12‐5‐based OSCs shows more efficient exciton dissociation and charge transfer, suppressed carrier recombination, tighter molecular π‐π stacking, and faster and more balanced charge transport, thus demonstrates a significantly improved efficiency of 18.77% than that of PTQ10‐based device (18.03%). Moreover, an outstanding efficiency of 19.36% is achieved in PTQ12‐5‐based ternary device by further modulating the energy level alignment and blending features of photoactive molecules, which is the highest efficiency of OSCs based on low‐cost polymers to date. This work has significant implications for guiding the design of low‐cost and high‐performance organic photovoltaic materials. By embedding the 2T‐2F unit into the molecular backbone of the classic low‐cost and high‐efficiency polymer PTQ10, three low‐cost terpolymer donors with simple structures are synthesized. The PTQ12‐5‐based organic solar cells achieve the highest power conversion efficiency of 19.36%, benefitting from the more efficient charge dissociation and transport, suppressed charge carrier recombination, and better phase separation morphology, etc.