This review highlights the factors limiting the stability of organic solar cells and recent developments in strategies to increase the stability of organic solar cells.

Despite significant development recently, improving the power conversion efficiency of organic photovoltaics (OPVs) is still an ongoing challenge to overcome. One of the prerequisites to achieving this goal is to enable efficient charge separation and small voltage losses at the same time. In this work, a facile synthetic strategy is reported, where optoelectronic properties are delicately tuned by the introduction of electron-deficient-core-based fused structure into non-fullerene acceptors. Both devices exhibited a low voltage loss of 0.57 V and high short-circuit current density of 22.0 mA cm⁻², resulting in high power conversion efficiencies of over 13.4%. These unconventional electron-deficient-core-based non-fullerene acceptors with near-infrared absorption lead to low non-radiative recombination losses in the resulting organic photovoltaics, contributing to a certified high power conversion efficiency of 12.6%.

Polymer solar cells (PSCs) based on blended films of a novel planar acceptor and P3HT gave power conversion efficiencies of up to 5.12%, which are much higher than that of PC₆₁BM-based control devices (3.71%) and the highest values reported for P3HT-based fullerene-free PSCs.