Insight into the efficiency-stability-cost balanced organic solar cell based on a polymerized nonfused-ring electron acceptor

Organic solar cells (OSCs) have attracted extensive attention from both academia and industry in recent years due to their remarkable improvement in power conversion efficiency (PCE). However, the Golden Triangle (the balance of efficiency-stability-cost) required for large-scale industrialization of OSCs still remains a great challenge. Here, a new nonfused-ring electron acceptor (NFREA) BF and its polymerized counterpart PBF were designed and synthesized, and their photovoltaic performance, storage stability and material cost were systematically investigated. When blended with a widely-used polymer donor PBDB-T, the PBF-based all-polymer solar cell (all-PSC) displayed a record high PCE of 12.61% for polymerized NFREAs (PNFREAs) with an excellent stability (95.2% of initial PCE after 800 h storage), superior to the BF counterpart. Impressively, PBF-based all-PSC possesses the highest industrial figure-of-merit (i-FOM) value of 0.309 based on an efficiency-stability-cost evaluation, in comparison to several representative OSC systems (such as PM6:Y6 and PBDB-T:PZ1). This work provides an insight into the balance of efficiency, stability, and cost, and also indicates that the PNFREAs are promising materials toward the commercial application of OSCs.