Mixed-flow design for microfluidic printing of two-component polymer semiconductor systems
Gang Wang, Liang‐Wen Feng, Wei Huang, S. Mukherjee, Yao Chen, Dengke Shen, Binghao Wang, Joseph Strzalka, Ding Zheng, Ferdinand S. Melkonyan, Jinhui Yan, J. Fraser Stoddart, Simone Fabiano, Dean M. DeLongchamp, Meifang Zhu, Antonio Facchetti, Tobin J. Marks
Abstract
Significance Blade coating is a promising methodology for the large-scale printing of polymer electronics, affording nonnegligible microstructure control and properties enhancement. Nevertheless, in two-component systems, the optical/electrical/physical properties are largely dominated by phase separation and domain purity phenomena that are challenging to control. Here, we report a mixed-flow microfluidic printing approach to phase purity control, enabled by a printing blade design based on fluid flow simulations. The result is 50% efficiency enhancement for printed all-polymer solar cells vs. conventional printing and similar enhancements for polymer transistors. Mixed flow is a versatile approach to control domain purity in two-component polymeric semiconductor systems and offers a methodology for printing high-performance soft-matter electronics.