Highly effi cient light absorption and charge separation within the photosystem and reaction center (RC) complexes of photosynthetic plants and bacteria are of great interest for solar cell and photo detector applications, since they offer almost unity quantum yield and expected ultimate power conversion effi ciencies of more than 18% and 12%, respectively. In addition, the charge separated states created by these protein complexes are very long lived compared to conventional semiconductor solar cells. In this work, a novel technique is presented for the deposition of photosynthetic protein complexes, by electrospraying RCs of Rhodobacter sphaeroides onto highly ordered pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) electrodes. Remarkably, it is shown that the RCs not only survive exposure to the high electric fi elds but also yield peak photocurrent densities of up to 7 µA cm −2 , which is equal to the highest value reported to date.
An integrated solar energy conversion and storage system is presented using a dye sensitized electrode in a redox battery structure. A stable discharge voltage is shown with high areal energy storage capacity of 180 W h cm-2 by choosing iodide/polysulfide as the pair of active materials matched with permeable porous electrodes. The solar rechargeable battery system offers a higher round-trip efficiency and potential cost savings on fabrication compared to individual devices.
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