Fast printing and in situ morphology observation of organic photovoltaics using slot-die coating

Feng Liu; Sunzida Ferdous; Eric Schaible; Alexander Hexemer; Matthew Church; Xiaodong Ding; Cheng Wang; Thomas P Russell

doi:10.1002/adma.201404040

Fast printing and in situ morphology observation of organic photovoltaics using slot-die coating

Adv Mater. 2015 Feb 4;27(5):886-91. doi: 10.1002/adma.201404040. Epub 2014 Dec 12.

Authors

Feng Liu¹, Sunzida Ferdous, Eric Schaible, Alexander Hexemer, Matthew Church, Xiaodong Ding, Cheng Wang, Thomas P Russell

Affiliation

¹ Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA; Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.

PMID: 25503869
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201404040

Abstract

The mini-slot-die coater offers a simple, convenient, materials-efficient route to print bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) organic photovoltaics (OPVs) that show efficiencies similar to spin-coating. Grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXD) and GI small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) methods are used in real time to characterize the active-layer formation during printing. A polymer-aggregation-phase-separation-crystallization mechanism for the evolution of the morphology describes the observations.

Keywords: X-ray diffraction; low bandgap polymers; morphology; organic photovoltaics.