Possible efficiency boosting of non-fullerene acceptor solar cell using device simulation

The non-fullerene acceptor bulk heterojunction organic solar cells (NFA-BHJ-OSCs) have attracted lots of interest due to their higher stability and greater efficiency compared with traditional fullerene acceptor solar cells. However, no simulation efforts have been done before regarding non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) solar cells to investigate the impact of technological parameters on their performance. Throughout our work, we sought out to perform a comprehensive simulation study of a conventional structure of a cell with 3,9-bis (2-methylene-(3- (1,1-dicyanomethylene)-indanone)-5,5,11,11-tetraki(4-hexylphenyl)-dithieno[2,3-d:2',3'-d']-s-indaceno[1,2-b:5,6-b']dithiophene) (ITIC) as NFA and poly[(2,6-(4,8-bis(5-(2-ethylhexyl)thiophen-2-yl]benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']dithiophene)-co-(1,3-di (5-thiophene-2-yl)-5,7- bis(2-ethylhexyl)benzo[1,2-c:4,5-c']dithiophene-4,8-dione)] (PBDB-T) as the polymeric donor. We studied the impact of several parameters on the cell performance and improved the efficiency by adjusting the parameters of the hole transport layer (HTL) and the electron transport layer (ETL). SCAPS program has been utilized to simulate the structure and the validity of its simulation has been verified by comparing the I-V characteristics with measurements from a reported literature. According to our presented optimization, some encouraging results were obtained: a short circuit current (J(sc)) of 16.2 mA/cm(2), open circuit voltage (V-oc) of 1.06 V, fill factor (FF) of 82.95% and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 14.25%. The obtained results pave the way for high efficiency NFA solar cells.