Effect of annealing treatment on the performance of organic photovoltaic devices using SPFGraphene as electron-accepter material

We have researched the performances of organic photovoltaic devices with the bulk heterojunction (BHJ) structure using the organic solution-processable functionalized graphene (SPFGraphene) material as the electron-accepter material and P3OT as the donor material. The structural configuration of the device is ITO/PEDOT:PSS/P3OT:PCBM-SPFGraphene/LiF/Al. Given the P3OT/PCBM (1:1) mixture with 8wt% of SPFGraphene, the open-circuit voltage (V oc) of the device reaches 0.64 V, a short-circuit current density (J sc) reaches 5.7 mA/cm2, a fill factor (FF) reaches 0.42, and the power conversion efficiency (η) reaches 1.53% at illumination at 100 mW/cm2 AM1.5. We further studied the reason for the device performances improvement. In the P3OT:PCBM-SPFGraphene composite, the SPFGraphene material acts as exciton dissociation sites and provides the transport pathways of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO)-SPFGraphene-Al. Furthermore, adding SPFGraphene to P3OT results in appropriate energetic distance between the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and LUMO of the donor/acceptor and provides higher exciton dissociation volume mobility of carrier transport. We have researched the effect of annealing treatment for the devices and found that the devices with annealing treatment at 180°C show better performances compared with devices without annealed treatment. The devices with annealed treatment show the best performance, with an enhancement of the power conversion efficiency from 1.53% to 1.75%.