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Highly efficient charge collection in dye-sensitized solar cells based on nanocomposite photoanode filled with indium-tin oxide interlayer

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Abstract

Owing to the electron scattering at the surface, the grain boundaries, and the defects of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles (NPs), the electron diffusion length in the mesoporous TiO2 layer is shorter than that of TiO2 bulk single crystal, leading to a significantly increased charge recombination in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), herein TiO2 photoanode sandwiching a layer of high-mobility indium-tin-oxide (ITO) granular film to form a TiO2/ITO/TiO2 (TIT) photoanode. A large number of ITO NPs would penetrate deep into the mesoporous TiO2 bottom layer to form the interconnected network, which can be served as high-speed electron transport channels, thereby enhancing the electron transfer and collection abilities. Compared with the reference device assembled with TiO2/TiO2 (TT) photoanode, an increase of 14.78% in power conversion efficiency (PCE) was obtained for the optimized TIT device (8.23 vs 7.17%), which can be ascribed to the synergistic effects of faster electron transport and less charge recombination. Moreover, the electron transfer ability of TIT layer was also superior to TiO2-ITO composite photoanode, in which ITO NPs were uniformly dispersed in the TiO2 mesoporous layer. Overall, this method paves a facile and effective way to improve the photovoltaic performance for highly efficient DSSCs of practical significance.

The interconnected transport channel consisting of the high-mobility ITO interlayer enhances the electron transfer and collection abilities.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support of this research by the National Natural Science Foundations of China (Nos. 51702036, 51472043, 61761016, and 51775152), the National Key R&D Plan (2016YFE0126900), Sichuan Science and Technology Planning Project (2017GZ0135),the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. ZYGX2015KYQD039, ZYGX2015J028, ZYGX2015J032, and ZYGX2015Z010), and the Sichuan Thousand Talents program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials and Energy, State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Film and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, People’s Republic of China

    Haijun Chen, Tao Liu, Bing Wang, Zheting Liu, Yingxiang Li, Qiang Zhao, Ning Wang & Hongcai He

  2. State Key Laboratory of Marine Resource Utilization in South China Sea, Hainan University, Haikou, 570228, People’s Republic of China

    Ning Wang

  3. Integrated Composites Lab (ICL), Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37966, USA

    Hu Liu & Zhanhu Guo

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  1. Haijun Chen
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  2. Tao Liu
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Correspondence to Tao Liu, Ning Wang or Zhanhu Guo.

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Chen, H., Liu, T., Wang, B. et al. Highly efficient charge collection in dye-sensitized solar cells based on nanocomposite photoanode filled with indium-tin oxide interlayer. Adv Compos Hybrid Mater 1, 356–363 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42114-018-0035-4

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