(273a) Self-Assembly of Rod-Coil Block Copolymers for Photovoltaic Applications

Recently there has been lot of interest in utilizing polymers for photovoltaic applications. One attractive candidate is using rod-coil block copolymers. The rod block is semiconducting conjugated polymer that acts as electron donor, while the electron acceptor is introduced into the flexible block. The photovoltaic properties of such device are expected to be affected by the internal polymer morphology. We utilize self-consistent field theory to obtain the equilibrium morphologies for rod-coil block copolymers and nature of orientation of the rod molecules. Then we use the morphologies obtained from these simulations into a model to describe the photovoltaic device characteristics. Utilizing this combined modeling procedure, we attempt to predict the morphologies of rod-coil block copolymers which can lead to high values of photovoltaic efficiencies.