Revisiting the Classical Wide-Bandgap HOMO and Random Copolymers for Indoor Artificial Light Photovoltaics

Organic indoor photovoltaics (IPVs) are attractive energy harvesting devices for low-power consumption electronic devices and the Internet of Things (IoTs) owing to their properties such as being lightweight, semitransparent, having multicoloring capability, and flexibility. It is important to match the absorption range of photoactive materials with the emission spectra of indoor light sources that have a visible range of 400–700 nm for IPVs to provide sustainable, high-power density. To this end, benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b′]dithiophene-based homopolymer (PBDTT) is synthesized as a polymer donor, which is a classical material that has a wide bandgap with a deep highest occupied molecular orbitals (HOMO) level, and a series of random copolymers by incorporating thieno[3,4-c]pyrrole-4,6,-dione (TPD) as a weak electron acceptor unit in PBDTT. The composition of the TPD unit is varied to fine tune the absorption range of the polymers; the polymer containing 70% TPD (B30T70) perfectly covers the entire range of indoor lamps such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and fluorescent lamp (FL). Consequently, B30T70 shows a dramatic enhancement of the power conversion efficiency (PCE) from 1-sun (PCE: 6.0%) to the indoor environment (PCE: 18.3%) when fabricating organic IPVs by blending with PC₇₁BM. The simple, easy molecular design guidelines are suggested to develop photoactive materials for efficient organic IPVs.