Proceedings of Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics (IPEROP23)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.iperop.2023.039
Publication date: 21st November 2022
Photosensitizers yielding superior photocurrents are crucial for copper-electrolyte-based highly efficient dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). Herein, we present two molecularly tailored organic sensitizers coded ZS4 and ZS5 through judiciously employing dithieno[3,2-b:2',3'-d]pyrrole (DTP) as the p-linker, and hexyloxy-substituted diphenylquinoxaline (HPQ) or naphthalene-fused-quinoxaline (NFQ) as the auxiliary electron-accepting unit, respectively. Endowed with the HPQ acceptor, ZS4 shows more efficient electron injection and charge collection based on substantially reduced interfacial charge recombination as compared to ZS5. As a result, ZS4-based DSCs achieve a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 13.2% under standard AM1.5 G sunlight, with a high short-circuit photocurrent density (Jsc) of 16.3 mA cm-2, an open-circuit voltage (Voc) of 1.05 V and a fill factor (FF) of 77.1%. Remarkably, DSCs sensitized by with ZS4 exhibit an outstanding stability, retaining 95% of their initial PCE under continuous light soaking for 1000 h. To the best of our knowledge, this is the record efficiency reported so far for copper-electrolyte-based DSCs using a single sensitizer. Our work highlights the importance of developing molecularly tailored photosensitizers for highly efficient DSCs with copper electrolyte.