Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV16)
Publication date: 28th March 2016
The common trend in designing dyes for use in DSSCs with iodide-based electrolyte is based on a donor - πspacer - acceptor (D-π-A) architecture. Here, we report three ‘donor-free’ cyanoacrylic end-functionalized dyes (5T,CPDT-2,CPDT-3). Despite having no donor group, these dyes show reversible firstoxidation process.These dyeshave n-hexyl alkyl chains to retard aggregation at different positions as well as different numbers of thiophene moieties. However, the dyes showed similar absorption properties and redox potentials. The DSSCs based on these dyes give power conversion efficiencies of more than 7%, although a significant difference in the VOC and FF has been observed.The addition of each CPDT unit led to an excepted red shift in the UV-vis spectrum and also an increase in the extinction coefficient. Their superb absorption capability shows great potential in applying as sensitisers in DSSCs. Overall, these dyes introduce a new and effective design conceptfor liquid-electrolyte DSSC sensitisers. More 'donor-free' dyes(diCPDT-2, diCPDT-3) based on CPDT will be synthesized to acheive better performance.