The high-temperature thermal stability of solution-processed polymer solar cells is a key issue that determines the feasibility of further thermal encapsulation processes, such as thermal lamination or hightemperature atomic layer deposition. In this article, polymer solar cells with
poly(3, 4-ethylenedioxythiophene)/poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) or MoO3 as the anode buffer layer (ABL) and ZnO or LiF as the cathode buffer layer (CBL) were fabricated with a device structure of indium tin oxide (ITO)/ABL/poly(3-hexylthiophene): phenyl- C61- butyric
acid methyl ester (P3HT:PC61BM)/CBL/Al. Device performances, especially the hightemperature thermal stability of the devices, were studied in detail. The results indicated that the thermal stability of the organic solar cells was highly dependent on the buffer layer material. Devices
with MoO3 as ABL and ZnO as CBL showed high thermal stability at a temperature of 120-150 , which ensures the possibility of subsequent thermal processing. In addition, the use of ZnO as the cathode buffer layer could also improve longterm device stability.
One of the most interesting structures of organic photodetectors (OPDs) is the bulk heterojunction (BHJ), which can be achieved by mixing electron donors and electron acceptors in a suitable solvent and then spin-coating. BHJs have proven to be a very useful method to overcome the short diffusion length of organic semiconductor excitons. However, this structure enhances disorder and hinders the collection of photogenerated carriers. Therefore, it is very important to prepare OPDs with this structure. In this paper, we show how to use conjugate polymer donor poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and fullerene derivative acceptor 6,6-phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PC61BM) to form a binary BHJ active layer by spin-coating to improve the performance and detector wavelength of a ZnO ultraviolet (UV) photodetector (PD). Compared with the ZnO UV PD, the responsivity of the OPD can reach 0.58 A W–1, which is increased by about 7.14 times. Furthermore, the OPD shows improved absorption, high photocurrent to dark current ratio (1.63 × 104), and excellent detection capability (3.67 × 1012 Jones). The preparation of a new OPD by this work shows strong performance and provides a new idea for the research of OPD. Therefore, it is very important to design and manufacture ZnO UV PD to form a BHJ OPD with organic polymers P3HT:PC61BM.