Nanoparticle Assisted Mechanical Delamination for Freestanding High Performance Organic Devices

Organic electronics has the potential to be incorporated in any kind of surface morphology for wearable or fully portable applications. Unfortunately when organic devices, such as solar cells, are fabricated on flexible substrates, the device performance is severely limited unless the physical properties of such substrates are carefully chosen. Here, it is demonstrated that layers of nanoparticles with a size gradient distribution can be used to obtain high performance solar cell devices that can be effectively delaminated from an original flat and rigid glass substrate. Such sacrificial nanoparticles layers are incorporated in between the glass substrate and the semitransparent electrode of a polymer: fullerene (PTB7: PC71BM) cell. After the cell delamination, freestanding flexible devices with power conversion efficiencies as high as 7.12% are obtained, which corresponds to 90% of the performance of the same cell fabricated on a standard glass smooth surface.