An adequate avenue towards well-designed PBDT-DTNT:PCBM active layers via quantum dot/conductive polymer configurations

Graphene quantum dots (GQD) and carbon quantum dots (CQD) were employed to develop the patterned GQD/CQD/poly[benzodithiophene-bis(decyltetradecyl-thien) naphthothiadiazole] (PBDT-DTNT) short/long chain, crab-like GQD/semicrab-like CQD/poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) short chain, and pellet-like GQD/CQD/P3HT long chain supramolecules. Nanostructures were used in roles of modifier, donor, and acceptor constituents in ternary (PBDT-DTNT:[6,6]-phenyl-C71 butyric acid methyl ester (PC71BM)) and binary photoactive layers. Application of pre-designed patterned quantum dot (QD)/PBDT-DTNT short chain nano-hybrids as morphology modifier promoted the performance up to 4.79%. P3HT-based supramolecules acted conspicuously better than PBDT-DTNT ones. The highest efficacies of 7.14 and 6.24% were detected in PBDT-DTNT:PC71BM:GQD/P3HT short chain (14.63 mA cm–2, 68.71%, 0.71 V and 287 Ω cm2) and PBDT-DTNT:PC71BM:CQD/P3HT short chain (13.35 mA cm–2, 66.79%, 0.70 V and 447 Ω cm2) systems, respectively. In addition to ternary photovoltaics, the binary devices were fabricated using the QDs and their associated supramolecules as donor and acceptor agents. Exactly similar to ternary cells, the crab/semicrab-like and pellet-like nano-hybrids, acted better than the PBDT-DTNT patterned nano-hybrids. The best results were recorded for PBDT-DTNT:GQD/P3HT short chain (2.93%) and PBDT-DTNT:CQD/P3HT short chain (2.67%) solar cells. In second type of binary photovoltaics, the QDs and their correlated supramolecules were utilized as electron donor and a maximum performance of 0.22% was acquired.