Hydroxamic acid pre-adsorption raises the efficiency of cosensitized solar cells

Yameng Ren, Dan Zhang, Jiajia Suo, Yiming Cao (), Felix T. Eickemeyer, Nick Vlachopoulos, Shaik M. Zakeeruddin, Anders Hagfeldt () and Michael Grätzel ()
Additional contact information
Yameng Ren: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Dan Zhang: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Jiajia Suo: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Yiming Cao: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Felix T. Eickemeyer: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Nick Vlachopoulos: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Shaik M. Zakeeruddin: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Anders Hagfeldt: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Michael Grätzel: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Nature, 2023, vol. 613, issue 7942, 60-65

Abstract: Abstract Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) convert light into electricity by using photosensitizers adsorbed on the surface of nanocrystalline mesoporous titanium dioxide (TiO2) films along with electrolytes or solid charge-transport materials1–3. They possess many features including transparency, multicolour and low-cost fabrication, and are being deployed in glass facades, skylights and greenhouses4. Recent development of sensitizers5–10, redox mediators11–13 and device structures14 has improved the performance of DSCs, particularly under ambient light conditions14–17. To further enhance their efficiency, it is pivotal to control the assembly of dye molecules on the surface of TiO2 to favour charge generation. Here we report a route of pre-adsorbing a monolayer of a hydroxamic acid derivative on the surface of TiO2 to improve the dye molecular packing and photovoltaic performance of two newly designed co-adsorbed sensitizers that harvest light quantitatively across the entire visible domain. The best performing cosensitized solar cells exhibited a power conversion efficiency of 15.2% (which has been independently confirmed) under a standard air mass of 1.5 global simulated sunlight, and showed long-term operational stability (500 h). Devices with a larger active area of 2.8 cm2 exhibited a power conversion efficiency of 28.4% to 30.2% over a wide range of ambient light intensities, along with high stability. Our findings pave the way for facile access to high-performance DSCs and offer promising prospects for applications as power supplies and battery replacements for low-power electronic devices18–20 that use ambient light as their energy source.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05460-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:613:y:2023:i:7942:d:10.1038_s41586-022-05460-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05460-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().