Efficiency Enhancement of Single‐Walled Carbon Nanotube‐Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells Using Microwave‐Exfoliated Few‐Layer Black Phosphorus

Abstract

Carbon nanotube-silicon (CNT-Si)-based heterojunction solar cells (HJSCs)are a promising photovoltaic (PV) system. Herein, few-layer black phosphorus (FL-BP) sheets are produced in N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) using microwave-assisted liquid-phase exfoliation and introduced into the CNTs-Sibased HJSCs for the first time. The NMP-based FL-BP sheets remain stable after mixing with aqueous CNT dispersion for device fabrication. Due to their unique 2D structure and p-type dominated conduction, the FL-BP/NMP incorporated CNT-Si devices show an impressive improvement in the power conversion efficiency from 7.52% (control CNT-Si cell) to 9.37%. Our densityfunctional theory calculation reveals that lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) of FL-BP is higher in energy than that of single-walled CNT. Therefore, we observed a reduction in the orbitals localized on FL-BP upon highest occupied molecular orbital to LUMO transition, which corresponds to an improved charge transport. This study opens a new avenue in utilizing 2D phosphorene nanosheets for next-generation PVs.

Advanced Phosphorus‐Based Materials for Lithium/Sodium‐Ion Batteries: Recent Developments and Future Perspectives

“…c) Cycle performance comparison of phosphorus composites nanosheets and RP materials at 0.2 A g −1 . Recently, phosphorene enjoys an enormous interest for development in a wide range of applications such as field-effect transistors, [41,181] optoelectronics, [55,235] photocatalysis, [173] water splitting, [58] PV cells, [236][237][238][239] batteries, [55] and so forth, rising up as a research star. e) Schematic of lithiation/ delithiation processes for the bulk RP and holey phosphorus nanosheets.…”

Efficient Production of Phosphorene Nanosheets via Shear Stress Mediated Exfoliation for Low‐Temperature Perovskite Solar Cells

“…These issues have led to significant effort being focused on finding alternative LPE methods and excellent progress has been made in the production of solution processable phosphorene . Recently, we used a microwave based approach to exfoliate the BP to obtain high‐quality, few‐layer BP sheets which showed exceptional stability . However, the solvent used was a high boiling solvent that is not compatible with many applications.…”

Preparation of Hybrid Molybdenum Disulfide/Single Wall Carbon Nanotube–n-Type Silicon Solar Cells

“…Previous work has produced the Si/MoS 2 /SWCNT layered structure (see Figure 1iii) [35]. Other work using 2D materials has often made hybrids of the 2D materials and the SWCNTs [36,37]. This work presents the first direct comparison between these two approaches using the same dispersions of materials to probe if one approach will provide better performance compared to the other.…”