Colorful and Semitransparent Organic Solar Modules via Air-Blade Assisted Coating of Active Layers

Organic solar modules (OSMs) hold potential for building-integrated photovoltaics, yet facing challenges to fabricate uniform and large-area active layers over non-halogenated solvent coating. In this work, room-temperature air-blade assisted (RT/A) coating is presented that helps obtaining uniform active layers under ambient and non-halogenated solvent processing. It is revealed that RT/A coating mitigates the film inhomogeneity that is commonly observed during hot-substrate coating. Different to the thermal gradients-induced inhomogeneous liquid-to-solid transition of hot-substrate coating, RT/A strategy enables the control of transition time on film formation via directional gas flow to yield high-quality active layer blends at ambient coating. Large-area active layers from RT/A coating exhibit good consistency and uniformity. The resultant OSMs achieve high efficiencies with the certified PCE of 14.5% at 19.31 cm² area (recorded in solar cell efficiency tables, version 60). By further integrating Fabry-Pérot transparent electrodes, colorful and semitransparent modules with PCEs of 12.80% are successfully developed. Overall, this work provides a promising method on the scalable fabrication of organic photovoltaics.