Organic solar cells spray-coated in air with enhanced efficiency and stable morphology

Wang, Qin; An, Kang; Li, Ning; Wu, Jialin; Roth, Stephan V.; Kang, Xingwang; Yan, Keyou; Zhang, Xin; Hui, Xujie; Jiang, Youyu; Meng, Wei; Ying, Lei; Yin, Zhipeng; Jiang, Xinyu; Zhou, Yinhua; Qi, Jingyan; Cui, Xin

doi:10.1039/D5EL00081E

Journal Article

PUBDB-2026-00555

Organic solar cells spray-coated in air with enhanced efficiency and stable morphology

Wang, Q. ; An, K. (Corresponding author) ; Cui, X. ; Jiang, X. (Corresponding author)Extern*DESY* ; Kang, X. ; Qi, J. ; Hui, X. ; Wu, J. ; Zhang, X. ; Yin, Z. ; Meng, W. ; Jiang, Y. (Corresponding author) ; Zhou, Y. ; Yan, K. ; Ying, L. ; Roth, S. V.XFEL.EU*DESY* ; Li, N. (Corresponding author)

2025
Royal Society of Chemistry Washington DC

EES solar 1(5), 847 - 856 (2025) [10.1039/D5EL00081E]

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Please use a persistent id in citations: doi:10.1039/D5EL00081E doi:10.3204/PUBDB-2026-00555

Abstract: Spray coating is a promising technique for the scalable fabrication of organic solar cells (OSCs) owing to its high compatibility with arbitrarily shaped substrates. However, the insights and analyses from the widely used spin-coating technique cannot be directly transferred to spraying. In this work, we systematically investigate the transformation from conventional spin-coating to spray coating for a representative OSC system, PM6 : DTY6 : L8-BO. The conventionally used chloroform (CF) solvent in spray coating leads to a significant drop in the power conversion efficiency (PCE) and stability, owing to an inferior morphology, while optimized toluene (TL) films enable superior performance and enhanced long-term stability. In situ spectroscopy and systematic morphology investigations reveal that the two solvents exhibit distinct film formation kinetics, with TL promoting a more gradual and uniform assembly process, leading to more favorable molecular packing and reduced amorphous clustering. The optimized TL-sprayed device achieved a PCE comparable to the spin-coated one and maintained 97% of its initial performance after 1000 h of thermal aging at 65 °C. These findings highlight the critical role of morphology modification in performance and stability during processing technique transformation.

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