Manipulating Ag nanowire (AgNW) assembly to tailor the opto-electrical properties and surface morphology could improve the performance of next-generation transparent conductive electrodes. In this paper, we demonstrated a water-bath assisted convective assembly process at the temporary water/alcohol interface for fabricating hierarchical aligned AgNW electrodes. The convection flow plays an important role during the assembly process. The assembled AgNW film fabricated via three times orthogonal dip-coating at a water-bath temperature of 80 °C has a sheet resistance of 11.4 Ω sq⁻¹ with 89.9% transmittance at 550 nm. Moreover, the root mean square (RMS) of this assembled AgNW film was only 15.6 nm which is much lower than the spin-coated random AgNW film (37.6 nm) with a similar sheet resistance. This facile assembly route provides a new way for manufacturing and tailoring ordered nanowire-based devices.

Polythiophenes are the most promising electron donors for organic solar cells (OSCs) in large-scale manufacturing owing to their simple chemical structures and low production costs. However, the efficiency of polythiophene solar cells is largely limited because of the difficulty in morphology optimization. Herein, we report the construction of a refined fibril network structure in polythiophene:non-fullerene acceptor blends based on the classical nucleation theory. By screening solvents for polythiophene to obtain an appropriate nucleation driving force while ensuring that the non-fullerene acceptor does not over-crystallize, a refined crystalline fibril network morphology was obtained in the blend consisting of a structurally simple polythiophene P5TCN-HD and a non-fullerene acceptor. This optimal morphology improved exciton dissociation and charge transport, thereby endowing the solar cells with an unprecedented power conversion efficiency of 18.12% and a fill factor of 79.17%, marking new breakthroughs for polythiophene-based OSCs. Notably, these results were achieved using toluene as the solvent, which is a common non-halogenated and environmentally benign solvent. Moreover, the crucial impact of solvent quality on the formation of the fibril network structure was revealed, offering valuable insights for optimizing the morphology of polythiophene systems. This underscores the promising prospect of polythiophenes in developing high-efficiency yet low-cost OSCs via environmentally benign processing, driving the industrialization of OSCs.

Recently, perovskites have garnered great attention owing to their outstanding characteristics, such as tunable bandgap, rapid absorption reaction, low cost and solution-based processing, leading to the development of high-quality and low-cost photovoltaic devices. However, the key challenges, such as stability, large-area processing, and toxicity, hinder the commercialization of perovskite solar cells (PSCs). In recent years, several studies have been carried out to overcome these issues and realize the commercialization of PSCs. Herein, the stability and photovoltaic efficiency improvement strategies of perovskite solar cells are briefly summarized from several directions, such as precursor doping, selection of hole/electron transport layer, tandem solar cell structure, and graphene-based PSCs. According to reference and analysis, we present our perspective on the future research directions and challenges of PSCs.