Proceedings of Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MAT-SUS) (NFM22)
Publication date: 11th July 2022
Off-grid electronic devices require energy autonomous energy supplies which can be realized via coupling a solar cell (SC) with an electrochemical energy storage. Such hybrid devices should be able to harvest energy from the environment, store and release it on-demand while having the lowest areal foot-print and being environmentally and economically friendly.
One of the most promising way to realize such a hybrid system with high level of integration is by using a three-electrode interconnection scheme, with a shared/common electrode between the SC and the electrochemical storage unit. In this case, charge carriers photogenerated by the solar cell migrate through the shared electrode, which acts simultaneously as a charge acceptor for the storage device. The two remaining electrodes close the circuit in the photovoltaic cell and the storage unit, respectively.
The sporadic nature of the energy source and consumption requires the storage device to operate efficiently under fast charging/discharging, which is a characteristic of a capacitive system but not a battery. Specifically, electric double layer capacitors (EDLCs) offer much faster power outputs but also large energy densities as they do not suffer from slow solid-state diffusion reactions. This making them suitable for the integration with SCs into photosupercapacitors.
As an electroactive material for EDLCs we used mesoporous Nitrogen-doped carbon nanospheres (MPNCs) produced via a hard-template approach based on aniline polymerization in the presence of 7 nm SiO2 template.1,2 This resulted in 140 nm highly monodisperse MPNCs with a large specific surface area (825 m2 g-1) and defined mesopores (~ 7 - 9 nm). Benefiting from the well-defined mesoporous network, MPNC-based EDLC delivered a high capacitance (400 F g-1 at 1 A g-1), resulting in large energy and power densities and high (95 %) coulombic efficiency.
As the solar cell, we used a 1.08 cm2 large photosensitive area p-i-n halide (FA0.75Cs0.25Pb(I0.8Br0.2)3 ) perovskite SC with an optimized layer sequence for improved cell stability, which could deliver a high Voc up to 1 V and current density up to 17.9 mA/cm2. Its further integration with the MPNC-EDLC through a shared electrode in a three-electrode configuration resulted in the monolithic free-standing photosupercapcaitor. The resulting photosupercapacitor showed fast (< 5 s) photocharging up to 1 V under 1‑sun illumination and an outstanding overall energy conversion efficiency of 11.8 %3 calculated using the approach employed in the literature. The photosupercapacitor could deliver up to 2.2 mW/cm2 and 4.27 mWh/cm2.
The proposed strategy of integration via three-electrode scheme with shared electrode was extended to produce MPNC based monilithic photosupercapacitors with other types of solar cells, including Si-SCs4 and organic SCs.5
This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence
Strategy—EXC-2193/1—390951807
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