Great improvement of catalytic activity of oxide counter electrodes fabricated in N2 atmosphere for dye-sensitized solar cells

Abstract

The dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) using SnO(2) and Nb(2)O(5) counter electrodes (CEs) prepared in N(2) atmosphere yielded power conversion efficiencies (PCE) of 6.09% and 4.65%, much higher than the PCE values (1.84%, 0.97%) of the DSCs using the same SnO(2) and Nb(2)O(5) CEs prepared in air.

Design a novel kind of open-ended carbon sphere for a highly effective counter electrode catalyst in dye-sensitized solar cells

“…Unlike the semiconductor, dye, and redox shuttle components, counter electrode (CE) catalysts are often overlooked. Fortunately, CE catalysts begun to attract increasing attention, as a class of new CE catalysts, such as carbon materials, [9][10][11][12] organic polymers, [13][14][15][16] and metal compounds [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] have been applied to replace conventional noble Pt CE. Among these Pt-free materials, carbon is a promising CE catalyst for use in DSCs because of its low cost, high conductivity, high catalytic activity, ready availability, high thermal stability, and corrosion resistance.…”

Directly hydrothermal growth of antimony sulfide on conductive substrate as efficient counter electrode for dye-sensitized solar cells

“…Recently, inorganic metal compounds based Pt-free catalysts for use in DSSCs developed rapidly, such as carbides [17][18][19][20][21][22][23], nitrides [24][25][26], oxides [27][28][29], sulfides [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] as well as selenides [38][39]. For example, Yang et al reported low cost Sn x S CE for DSSCs and demonstrated comparable power conversion efficiency to Pt [40].…”

“…However, the low abundance and high cost of Pt noble metal has restricted the large-scale commercialization of DSSCs. Therefore, considerable efforts have been made on developing low cost Pt-free catalytic materials on the purpose of making DSSCs more competitive for future commercialization and simultaneously maintaining the good performance [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30].…”

NH3-treated WO3 as low-cost and efficient counter electrode for dye-sensitized solar cells

“…These oxides may be further improved by changing their electronic structure. Hydrogen (H 2 ) or nitrogen (N 2 ) treatments have been proved to be a facile and efficient method to change the electronic structure of oxides, with which the efficiencies were improved from 0.63% to 5.43% for WO 3 by H 2 treatment and from 1.84% to 6.09% for SnO 2 by N 2 treatment [14,15]. However, the DSCs using these CEs still yield low fill factors (FF) and low efficiencies as compared to conventional Pt CEs; further improvements need to be carried out.…”