Semitransparent organic photovoltaics enabled by transparent p-type inorganic semiconductor and near-infrared acceptor
Xue Yan, Jiayu Wang, Wei He, Top Archie Dela Peña, Can Zhu, Hailin Yu, Yingyue Hu, Cenqi Yan, Shengqiang Ren, Xingyu Chen, Zhe Wang, Jiaying Wu, Mingjie Li, Jianlong Xia, Lei Meng, Shirong Lu, Dewei Zhao, Mikhail Artemyev, Yongfang Li, Pei Cheng
Abstract
Semitransparent organic photovoltaics (STOPVs) have gained wide attention owing to their promising applications in building-integrated photovoltaics, agrivoltaics, and floating photovoltaics. Organic semiconductors with high charge carrier mobility usually have planar and conjugated structures, thereby showing strong absorption in visible region. In this work, a new concept of incorporating transparent inorganic semiconductors is proposed for high-performance STOPVs. Copper(I) thiocyanate (CuSCN) is a visible-transparent inorganic semiconductor with an ionization potential of 5.45 eV and high hole mobility. The transparency of CuSCN benefits high average visible transmittance (AVT) of STOPVs. The energy levels of CuSCN as donor match those of near-infrared small molecule acceptor BTP-eC9, and the formed heterojunction exhibits an ability of exciton dissociation. High mobility of CuSCN contributes to a more favorable charge transport channel and suppresses charge recombination. The control STOPVs based on PM6/BTP-eC9 exhibit an AVT of 19.0% with a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 12.7%. Partial replacement of PM6 with CuSCN leads to a 63% increase in transmittance, resulting in a higher AVT of 30.9% and a comparable PCE of 10.8%.