Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV14)
Publication date: 1st March 2014
During recent years research in p-type dye-sensitized solar cells (p-DSSCs) has mainly focused on the development of NiO-based electrodes. Nevertheless, drawbacks including low Voc values, the inability to produce thick and mechanically stable films, and low conductivities constitute major bottlenecks en-route towards high performances.[1,2] Therefore, the search of new p-type semiconducting metal oxides is at the forefront of investigations. In 2008 Sumikura et al. have tested Copper(II)oxide (CuO) as a new p-type metaloxide for p-DSSCs.[3] Although efficiencies were as low as 0.011%, they demonstrated that CuO nanoparticles based films act as photocathodes. The latter let to a paradigm shift, that is, focusing on delafossite type transparent conducting oxides – CuAlO2, CuCrO2 and CuGaO2, etc. These combine high transparency and hole conductivity as well as a higher Voc due to shifts in the valence band energy.[4] To this end, efficiencies of around 0.05-0.18 % have been achieved using I3-/I- electrolytes.
Herein, we present p-DSSCs consisting of nanorod like CuO based photocathodes in combination with an electron accepting phthalocyanine as photosensitizer. By means of optimizing a number of key factors, namely the calcination temperature, the thickness of the electrode, the I3-/I- electrolyte ratio, and the sensitisation time, we realized efficiencies of up to 0.105%. As a complement, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy was employed to corroborate the enhancement of one order of magnitude relative to current state-of-art CuO p-DSSCs. Overall, our current work illustrates that integrating nanorod like CuO into photocathodes is competitive with respective to newly developed delafossite electrodes in p-type DSSCs.
SEM image of nanorod like CuO particles (100k magnification).
[1] C.-Y. Hsu, W.-T. Chen, Y.-C. Chen, H.-Y. Wei, Y.-S. Yen, K.-C. Huang, K.-C. Ho, C.-W. Chu, and J. T. Lin, Electrochim. Acta, 2012, 66, 210-215. [2] F. Odobel, and Y. Pellegrin, J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 2013, 4, 2551-2564. [3] S. Sumikura, S. Mori, S. Shimizu, H. Usami, and E. Suzuki, J. Photochem. Photobiol. A, 2008, 194 2 3, 143–147. [4] M. Yu, T. I. Draskovic, and Y. Wu, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2014, 16, 5026–5033.
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