Sediment

Engineering

Biology

Fabrication

Materials science

Coating

Deposition (geology)

Layer (electronics)

Telecommunications

Scalability

Computer science

Photoactive layer

Paleontology

Polymer

Alternative medicine

Nanotechnology

Database

Process engineering

Solar cell

Composite material

Medicine

Wireless

Organic solar cell

Throughput

Photovoltaics

Optoelectronics

Photovoltaic system

Electrical engineering

Pathology

Nature Energy

Despite the great success of organic photovoltaics in terms of device efficiency and stability at the laboratory scale, pressing demand for high-throughput and cost-effective solutions remains unresolved and rarely reported. Here we propose that a sequential-deposition, blade-coating approach using donor and acceptor materials can facilitate high-speed fabrication of photoactive layers while maintaining device performance. The sequential-deposition-processed blend and thickness of its designed PM6:T8 system can be optimized by the fine-tuning of the solution concentrations and coating speeds. We show that this strategy can be applied to a non-halogenated solvent and under high-humidity conditions. This high-speed approach is applicable to other non-fullerene photovoltaic systems and the slot-die coating technique. Techno-economic analysis suggests that this strategy can decrease the minimum sustainable price of module manufacturing. Overall, this work represents a step towards the scalable, cost-effective manufacturing of organic photovoltaics with both high performance and high throughput. High-speed deposition of organic solar cells is crucial to manufacturing, yet it remains a challenge. Now, Sun et al. show that layer-by-layer deposition holds potential for speeding up the fabrication of solar cells while retaining high efficiency.

High-speed sequential deposition of photoactive layers for organic solar cell manufacturing