Minimizing Energy Loss by Designing Multifunctional Solid Additives to Independent Regulation of Donor and Acceptor Layers for Efficient LBL Polymer Solar Cells

Solid additives are crucial in layer-by-layer (LBL) polymer solar cells (PSCs). Despite its importance, the simultaneous application of solid additives into both donor and acceptor layers has been largely overlooked. In this work, two multifunctional solid additives are actively designed, and investigated the synergistic effect on both donor and acceptor layers. Incorporating the multifunctional solid additives into the donor layer could effectively enhance the aggregation and molecular stacking of the donor polymer, leading to reduced energy disorder and minimizing ΔE₂. When the multifunctional solid additives are introduced into the acceptor layer, they just play a role in optimizing the morphology, thereby reducing the ΔE₃. Excitedly, the simultaneous addition of the multifunctional solid additives into both donor and acceptor layers produced a synergistic effect for decreasing ΔE₂ and ΔE₃ simultaneously, especially adding SA2, thus enabling an excellent power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 19.95% (certified as 19.68%) with an open-circuit voltage (V_oc) of 0.921 V, a short circuit current density (J_sc) of 27.08 mA cm^-2 and a fill factor (FF) of 79.98%. The work highlights the potential of multifunctional solid additives in independently regulating the properties of donor and acceptor layers, which is expected as a promising approach for further developing higher performance PSCs.