Scale-up synthesis of polymer semiconductor for lightweight and flexible solar cells

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Organic solar cells (OSCs) have emerged as a new solar cell technology because of their mechanical robustness, lightweight, and large-area fabrication capability to silicon-based and other types of solar cell technologies. However, the current polymer donor materials for OSCs are very costly due to their complicated synthetic processes, which impede the further exploitation and eventual commercialization of OSCs. The applicant recently invented a new polymer donor material, which can be simply made with a low synthetic complexity, which can be translated to a very low production cost at a commercial scale. More importantly the polymer exhibited high power conversion efficiency over 10%. As a result, an excellent balance between the cost and efficiency is achieved. In addition, the OSCs using this new polymer demonstrated excellent air stability. Therefore, this polymer has a great potential for realizing low-cost, high efficiency, and stable OSCs. This I2I phase I project will synthesize this new polymer at a large scale and achieve the same level of solar cell performance obtained for the small scale polymer. The success of this project will place a stepping stone towards the commercialization of this polymer and its solar cells.