Editorial on the Research Topic
Polymer Solar Cells: Molecular Design and Microstructure Control
Photovoltaic (PV) devices can directly convert sunlight into electricity, which enables a practical and facile solution to address the challenge of the ever-increasing energy demand in a sustainable way. Intensive research and development are searching for high efficiency solar cells with low-cost fabrication. So far PV devices based on various inorganic materials dominate the entire market, including silicon (Si), III-V group semiconductors, CIGS, and CdTe. However, partially due to the related environmental issues and high production cost, traditional PV technologies raise the obvious constraints on the further manufacturing capacity of system-cost, scale-up, and their wide adoption. Recently there has been an ever-growing interest in emerging polymer-based PV technology owing to synthetic variability and low-temperature solution-processing of organic semiconductors, and the capacity of lightweight, flexible, easy and low-cost manufacturing of devices. It is our great pleasure to propose this special issue entitled “Polymer Solar Cells: Molecular Design and Microstructure Control” for Frontiers in Chemistry. The issue highlights important aspects of structure-function relationship from both molecular design and microstructure control perspectives. We present a collection of 11 featured articles from this exciting field that covers molecular design of novel materials and microstructure control of the bulk heterojunction (BHJ) layer for high-performance polymer solar cells.