Bridging the lab-to-fab gap in non-fullerene organic solar cells via gravure printing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that high-efficiency non-fullerene organic solar cells can be effectively translated from lab to industrial roll-to-roll gravure printing, identifying key factors affecting performance and providing a pathway for scalable manufacturing.

Contribution

The study introduces a quantitative framework for analyzing printed non-fullerene solar cells and shows that device architecture, not material physics, limits performance in roll-to-roll processes.

Findings

Favorable morphology and exciton harvesting are maintained in gravure printing.

Efficiency losses mainly due to optical interference and slow charge transport.

Performance gap is due to device architecture, not material physics.

Abstract

Organic solar cells have reached record efficiencies with non-fullerene acceptors, yet their translation to industrial printing remains a critical bottleneck. Here we report the highest efficiency achieved for a fully roll-to-roll-compatible gravure-printed non-fullerene organic solar cell. High-performance blends are typically optimised under laboratory coating conditions, while roll-to-roll manufacturing imposes fundamentally different constraints on ink stability, drying dynamics, and multilayer integration. Whether these constraints intrinsically limit device physics has remained unresolved. Here, we demonstrate a gravure-printed PM6:Y12 solar cell architecture using commercially available materials and establish a quantitative framework that disentangles optical, recombination, and transport losses in printed devices. We find that favourable bulk morphology and exciton harvesting can be preserved under gravure printing and non-halogenated solvents. The dominant efficiency penalties arise instead from optical interference within the printed layer stack and slow charge transport. Our results demonstrate that the performance gap between laboratory and printed solar cells is originating from device architecture rather than the intrinsic physics of modern non-fullerene systems, providing a mechanistic roadmap for roll-to-roll manufacturing of non-fullerene solar cells.