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Abstract
Titanium(IV) oxide (TiO2, titania) is well-known for its excellent photocatalytic properties, wide bandgap, chemical resistance, and photostability. Nanostructured TiO2 is extensively utilized in various electronic and energy-related applications such as resistive switching memory devices, flat panel displays, photodiodes, solar water-splitting, photocatalysis, and solar cells. This article presents recent advances in the design and nanostructuring of TiO2-containing antireflective self-cleaning coatings for solar cells. In particular, the energy harvesting efficiency of a solar cell is greatly diminished by the surface reflections and deposition of environmental contaminants over time. Nanostructured TiO2 coatings not only minimize reflection through the graded transition of the refractive index but simultaneously improve the device’s ability to self-clean and photocatalytically degrade the pollutants. Thus, novel approaches to achieve higher solar cell efficiency and stability with pristine TiO2 and TiO2-containing nanocomposite coatings are highlighted herein. The results are compared and discussed to emphasize the key research and development shortfalls and a commercialization perspective is considered to guide future research.
Highlights
The environmental challenges such as global warming, air pollution, and climate change resulting from the burning of fossil fuels and growing awareness about these issues prompted the use of alternative and renewable energy sources
The researchers have shown that a compact TiO2 layer (60–100 nm) on dye-sensitized solar cells can improve the incident photonto-current conversion efficiency (IPCE) by 50% (Abdullah and Rusop, 2013; Abdullah and Rusop, 2014)
A notable achievement in this regard was reported by Lien et al (2006), who deposited TiO2 SLAR, SiO2/TiO2 Double-layer AR (DLAR), and SiO2/SiO2–TiO2/TiO2 triple-layer AR (TLAR) coatings on silicon solar cells via a sol-gel process
Summary
The environmental challenges such as global warming, air pollution, and climate change resulting from the burning of fossil fuels and growing awareness about these issues prompted the use of alternative and renewable energy sources. Metal-doped TiO2 ARCs are shown to alter the bandgap, increase solar energy absorption and conversion, and improve self-cleaning properties (Haider et al, 2016; Adak et al, 2017) Another strategy involves metal plasma ion implantation of various metal ions (e.g., Fe, Cr, V) in high-quality TiO2 films, which activates the TiO2 surface and improves the sunlight absorption rate (Weng and Huang, 2013). Vertically aligned Pt-decorated p-MoS2 nanostructures are fabricated on n-TiO2 nanotube arrays to benefit from Pt/MoS2 Schottky heterojunction and MoS2/TiO2 p-n heterojunction for visible-light degradation of methylene blue (Dong et al, 2020) These innovations are helpful in understanding the underlying mechanisms to improve the efficiency and lifetime of solar energy harvesting devices. An important aspect of future research is to find an optimal costto-efficiency balance through innovative yet simple, scalable, reproducible, and cost-effective methods for the fabrication of TiO2 ARCs
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