Conjugated Random Terpolymer Donors towards High-Efficiency Polymer Solar Cells

Over the past decades, polymer solar cells (PSCs) which contain conjugated polymers as electron donor and/or acceptor materials in active layers have achieved the power conversion efficiency (PCE) over 17%. Among them, tremendous alternative donor-acceptor (D-A) type conjugated copolymers have been reported as donor materials. Nevertheless, plenty of rooms still exist to further improve the photovoltaic performance for practical applications. Besides the exploration of the increasingly challenging novel D and/or A monomers to construct new D-A copolymer donors, conjugated random terpolymer donors which involve a third existing monomer (D or A) provide an extra simple promising strategy to promote the photovoltaic performance to a higher level. Herein, recent progress on random terpolymer donors for efficient PSCs was reviewed. Firstly, random terpolymer donors were classified by several typical molecular building blocks. Then, the influences of the third monomer on various random terpolymers were highlighted according to the enhancement of light-harvesting ability, modification of energy levels and optimization of the bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) morphology. Finally, several issues which might be concerned in future research on random terpolymer donors were proposed. This review may be helpful for providing guidelines to design efficient random terpolymer donors as well as better-understanding of the structure-property-performance correlations towards high performance PSCs via random terpolymer approach.