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

有机太阳能电池(OSCs)是一种新兴的太阳能电池技术，具有机械稳定性好、重量轻、可大面积制造等优点，适用于硅基和其他类型的太阳能电池技术。然而，目前用于OSCs的聚合物供体材料由于合成工艺复杂而非常昂贵，这阻碍了OSCs的进一步开发和最终的商业化。 申请人最近发明了一种新的聚合物给体材料，这种材料可以简单地制成，合成复杂性很低，可以转化为商业规模的非常低的生产成本。更重要的是，该聚合物具有10%以上的高功率转换效率。结果，在成本和效率之间实现了极好的平衡。此外，使用这种新型聚合物的OSCs表现出了优异的空气稳定性。因此，这种聚合物在实现低成本、高效率、稳定的OSCs方面具有很大的潜力。 这个I2I一期项目将大规模合成这种新聚合物，并达到与小规模聚合物相同的太阳能电池性能水平。该项目的成功将为这种聚合物及其太阳能电池的商业化奠定基础。

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.