OPV sustainability: challenges and opportunities: a materials science view

Immense efforts in the flexible electronics field have led to unprecedented progress and to devices of ever increasing performance. Despite these advances, new opportunities are sought in order to widen the applications of flexible electronics technologies, expand their functionalities/features, with an increasing view on delivering sustainable solutions. We discuss here opportunities the use of multicomponent systems for, e.g., increasing the mechanical flexibility and stability of organic electronic products, or introducing other features such as self-encapsulation and more robust transport. We demonstrate the working principle of semiconductor:insulator blends, examining the different approaches that have recently been reported in literature. We illustrate how organic solar cells (OPV)s can be fabricated with such systems without detrimental effects on the resulting device characteristics even at high contents of the insulator.