The development of renewable and clean energy has been acknowledged as a crucial solution to the issues of deteriorating environment.

Thanks to the advantages of light weight, transparency, flexibility, and low cost, organic solar cells (OSCs) have attracted increasing attention in the field of clean solar energy. OSCs have a broad application prospect in photovoltaic building integration, wearable flexible electronic devices and Internet of things (IoT) devices.

Despite the rapid improvement of power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of OSCs, which have exceeded 20%, relatively low stability has still hindered the commercial applications of OSCs.

Based on the previous series research on high-performance OSCs, Prof. GE Ziyi’s group from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has systematically summarized, classified and discussed the research advances in the stability of OSCs in the past three years. The study was published in Chemical Society Reviews.

Diverse strategies to improve device stability through material design were reviewed, involving the development of novel donors, acceptors, single-component materials, third components, hole transport materials, and electron transport materials.

Besides, versatile methods utilized to enhance the stability of OSCs via device engineering, like interlayer modification, processing optimization, and electrode modification, were summarized.

Moreover, the current advances of OSCs were compared and discussed in detail, in terms of materials–morphology–stability relationships, material stability, light stability, air stability, thermal stability, and mechanical stability.

The current development challenges and unsolved issues of highly stable OSCs were illustrated, such as the device degradation mechanism, universal physical theory model, environmental impact, standardization of stability testing procedures, lifetime, etc. Relevant suggestion for the synthesis of highly stable OSCs was also offered in this review, contributing to the future commercial applications of OSCs.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U21A20331), the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (No. 21925506), and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. LQ22E030013).

Fig. Factors and improvement strategies of the stability of organic solar cells (Image by NIMTE)

Contact
YANG Daobin
Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering
E-mail: yangdaobin@nimte.ac.cn