Highly-Efficient Plasmon-Enhanced Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Created by Means of Dry Plasma Reduction.

Van-Duong Dao,Ho-Suk Choi

doi:10.3390/nano6040070

Van-Duong Dao, Ho-Suk Choi

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/nano6040070

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Journal: Nanomaterials	Publication Date: Apr 14, 2016
Citations: 57	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Chungnam National University

Abstract

Plasmon-assisted energy conversion is investigated in a comparative study of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) equipped with photo-anodes, which are fabricated by forming gold (Au) and silver (Ag) nanoparticles (NPs) on an fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) glass surface by means of dry plasma reduction (DPR) and coating TiO2 paste onto the modified FTO glass through a screen printing method. As a result, the FTO/Ag-NPs/TiO2 photo-anode showed an enhancement of its photocurrent, whereas the FTO/Au-NPs/TiO2 photo-anode showed less photocurrent than even a standard photo-anode fabricated by simply coating TiO2 paste onto the modified FTO glass through screen printing. This result stems from the small size and high areal number density of Au-NPs on FTO glass, which prevent the incident light from reaching the TiO2 layer.

Highlights

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) can achieve comparatively high conversion efficiency levels at a low fabrication cost [1]
The working electrode (WE) has the greatest potential to improve the efficiency of a DSC, with the efficiency defined as the light-harvesting efficiency, due to its monolayer of adsorbed dye molecules [2]
In order to overcome these process restrictions, we developed a new process of efficiently synthesizing supported metal-NPs by means of dry plasma reduction (DPR) [10,11,12]

Summary

Introduction

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) can achieve comparatively high conversion efficiency levels at a low fabrication cost [1]. Plasmonic structures have been prepared by sputtering combined with annealing [6], soaking in a colloidal silver solution for as many as 15 hours [7] or with a plasmonic paste [8,9]. These techniques, require toxic chemicals for the synthesis process, high temperatures for annealing, extended times for soaking or a vacuum chamber for sputtering, all indicating that developing an economic continuous process remains a challenge [10]

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