Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV14)
Publication date: 1st March 2014
Since the original dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) design with colloidal TiO2 thin films, a variety of mesoporous metal oxides with high surface area have been used as scaffolds for the attachment of sensitizer monolayers. For the metal oxide semiconductors, several requirements have to be fulfilled. Firstly, the metal oxide should be a wide bandgap material with negligible overlap between light absorption of semiconductor and sensitizer. Secondly, the conduction band of the metal oxide should lie below the excited state of the sensitizer to allow efficient electron injection. Finally, the scaffold material should possess a high charge carrier mobility to allow the diffusion of injected electrons from the sensitizer to the anode. Recent studies have shown that DSCs composed of nanocrystalline SnO2 in conjunction with an organic dye and a solid inorganic hole transport medium (HTM) performed almost as well as mesoporous TiO2.1
The use of SnO2 as a semiconducting metal oxide for the working electrode of quantum-dot-sensitized solar cells (QDSCs) in conjunction with PbS quantum dots (QDs) has several advantages over TiO2. The first is that the charge carrier mobility in SnO2 is a 100 times higher than in TiO2, which should have a positive impact on the diffusion of photoinjected electrons into the electrode. The second and more important advantage is that the conduction band of SnO2 is 0.2 – 0.3 eV lower in energy compared to TiO2. This should facilitate the injection of excited electrons from PbS into the conduction band of SnO2 and therefore increase the photocurrent.2 However, a decrease of photovoltage can also be expected due to the lowered conduction band of SnO2 compared to TiO2. Therefore, the SnO2/PbS-QD can be a suitable model system to study charge injection and separation as well as the impact of acceptor/donor interface tuning on recombination processes.3
In this work, solar cells with porous nanocrystalline SnO2 thin films sensitized with PbS QDs and infiltrated with spiro-OMeTAD organic HTM were investigated.4 The SnO2/PbS-QDs/spiro-OMeTAD system is interesting because few studies have examined the mechanisms of charge injection, regeneration and recombination at the PbS QD, metal oxide and HTM interfaces. The surface treatment of SnO2 electrodes with thin layers of MgO and TiO2 was also investigated to examine the effect of surface passivation on cell performance.5
1. Snaith H. J.; Schmidt-Mende, L. Advances in Liquid-Electrolyte and Solid-State Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells. Advanced Materials, 2007, 19, 3187-3200. 2. Leventis, H. C.; O’Mahony, F.; Akhtar, J.; Afzaal, M.; O’Brien, P.; Haque, S. A. Transient Optical Studies of Interfacial Charge Transfer at Nanostructured Metal Oxide/PbS Quantum Dot/Organic Hole Conductor Heterojunctions. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2010, 132, 2743-2750. 3. Huang, Q.; Li, F.; Gong, Y.; Luo, J.; Yang, S.; Luo, Y.; Li, D.; Bai, X.; Meng, Q. Recombination in SnO2-Based Quantum Dots Sensitized Solar Cells: The Role of Surface States. The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 2013, 117, 10965-10973. 4. Snaith, H. J.; Stavrinadis, A.; Docampo, P.; Watt, A. A. R. Lead-sulphide quantum-dot sensitization of tin oxide based hybrid solar cells. Solar Energy, 2011, 85, 1283-1290. 5. Snaith, H. J.; Ducati, C. SnO2-Based Dye-Sensitized Hybrid Solar Cells Exhibiting Near Unity Absorbed Photon-to-Electron Conversion Efficiency. Nano Letters, 2010, 10, 1259-1265.
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