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

有机太阳能电池（OSC）已经成为一种新的太阳能电池技术，因为它们的机械坚固性、重量轻和大面积制造能力优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其复杂的合成工艺而非常昂贵，这阻碍了OSCs的进一步开发和最终商业化。 申请人最近发明了一种新的聚合物供体材料，其可以简单地以低合成复杂性制备，这可以转化为商业规模的非常低的生产成本。更重要的是，聚合物表现出超过10%的高功率转换效率。结果，实现了成本和效率之间的良好平衡。此外，使用这种新聚合物的OSC表现出优异的空气稳定性。因此，该聚合物具有实现低成本、高效率和稳定的OSC的巨大潜力。 I2I第一阶段项目将大规模合成这种新型聚合物，并实现与小规模聚合物相同的太阳能电池性能。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.