A Coupled Organic Solar Battery with 12.1% Efficiency

Xiang Zhang; Lei Jiao; Weiqiang Guo; Zhiwei Xiao; Enbo Zhou; Yan-Xi Tan; Yangyang Feng; Daqiang Yuan; Yaobing Wang

doi:10.1021/jacs.5c00662

A Coupled Organic Solar Battery with 12.1% Efficiency

J Am Chem Soc. 2025 Jun 25;147(25):21443-21450. doi: 10.1021/jacs.5c00662. Epub 2025 Jun 10.

Authors

Xiang Zhang^{1

2

3}, Lei Jiao^{1

3}, Weiqiang Guo¹, Zhiwei Xiao¹, Enbo Zhou^{1

3}, Yan-Xi Tan⁴, Yangyang Feng^{1

3}, Daqiang Yuan^{1

2

3}, Yaobing Wang^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ CAS Key Laboratory of Design and Assembly of Functional Nanostructures, and Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Nanomaterials, State Key Laboratory of Structural Chemistry, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fuzhou, Fujian 350002, P. R. China.
² Fujian Science and Technology Innovation Laboratory for Optoelectronic Information of China, Fuzhou, Fujian 350108, P. R. China.
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, P. R. China.
⁴ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Guangxi Minzu University, Nanning 530006, China.

PMID: 40493029
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5c00662

Abstract

Coupled solar batteries enable direct solar-to-electrochemical energy storage but show low efficiencies due to insufficient solar spectrum utilization. Here, we report the exciton-coupled redox reactions over molecular photoelectrochemical materials for wide-spectrum, high-efficiency, coupled organic solar batteries. The molecular materials are prescreened to match the redox potential with visible light photovoltage for band-edge excitons utilization. The combination of strong donor-acceptor structure with external ion polarization enables long-lived superband gap excitons under ultraviolet light for hot exciton redox reactions, while the incorporation of photothermal molecular motifs further realizes in-band near-infrared energy utilization by the photothermal exciton-photon coupling. A record-high solar-to-electrochemical energy storage efficiency of 12.1% and an exchange photocurrent of 11.2 mA cm^-2 at 0.93 V were achieved under full-spectrum illumination. The long-term stable operation of the manufactured upscalable (∼200 cm²) tandem device under natural sunlight further demonstrates the potential of coupled organic solar batteries as a commercially viable system for practical applications.