Robot based high throughput engineering of alcoholic polymer:fullerene nanoparticle inks for the eco-friendly processing of organic solar cells.

Development of high-quality organic nanoparticle inks is a significant scientific challenge for the industrial production of solution-processed organic photovoltaics (OPVs) with eco-friendly processing methods. In this work, we demonstrate a novel, robot-based, high-throughput procedure performing automatic poly(3-hexylthio- phene-2,5-diyl) (P3HT) and indene-C60 bisadduct (ICBA) nanoparticle ink synthesis in non-toxic alcohols. A novel methodology to prepare particle dispersions for fully functional OPVs by manipulating the particle size and solvent system was studied in detail. The ethanol dispersion with a particle diameter around 80-100 nm exhibits reduced degradation yielding a power conversion efficiency of 4.52%, which is the highest performance reported so far for water/alcohol-processed OPV devices. By successfully deploying the high-throughput robot-based approach for organic nanoparticle ink preparation, we believe that the findings demonstrated in this work will trigger more research interest and effort on eco-friendly industrial production of OPVs.