This research reveals how effective elastomer density influences power conversion efficiency in intrinsically stretchable organic solar cells, suggesting a pathway for optimal device design.
Intrinsically stretchable organic solar cells (IS‐OSCs) are highly promising for next‐generation wearable electronics. The incorporation of thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) provides a cost‐effective strategy to improve mechanical compliance. However, the influence of TPE structural diversity on device performance has been largely overlooked. In this work, the concept of effective elastomer density ( D e ) is introduced as a unified molecular descriptor to quantitatively evaluate how elastomer structures affect IS‐OSC morphology and functionality. It is demonstrated that increasing D e enhances stretchability by inducing domain coarsening and surface roughening in amorphous regions, but simultaneously prolongs exciton lifetimes and suppresses charge extraction and transport. Notably, IS‐OSCs achieve an optimal balance at a critical D e of 1.5 mol m −3 , delivering a high initial power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 14.3% and retaining 80% of the initial PCE at 30.6% strain, representing the best performance reported to date for IS‐OSCs employing the elastomer‐plasticization strategy. This descriptor‐based framework provides a predictive and generalizable guideline for the molecular design of elastomers in stretchable optoelectronic devices.
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Sun et al. (2025) studied this question.
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