Abstract
Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have attracted considerable attention as an alternative to silicon-based solar cells due to their potential advantages in terms of power conversion efficiency, production cost, design flexibility, and indoor use. Because the photovoltaic performance of DSSCs strongly depends on sensitizers, various kinds of sensitizers have been developed. Among them, porphyrin sensitizers have made remarkable contribution to performance improvement in DSSCs. The push–pull type porphyrin sensitizers have displayed excellent light-harvesting ability and demonstrated high power conversion efficiencies more than 10% in DSSCs.Meanwhile, incorporation of aromatic-fused structure into a porphyrin core is a fascinating option for highly efficient DSSCs because of direct π-expansion of the porphyrin core and resultant red-shifted absorption. However, aromatic-fused porphyrin sensitizers have suffered rather low cell performances due to their mismatch of HOMO-LUMO levels, high aggregation tendency, and short lifetime of the excited states. Bearing these in mind, we envisioned that the introduction of methylene-bridged fused structure into a porphyrin core would overcome these drawbacks, boosting the cell performance. In this context, we designed and synthesized a series of methylene-bridged thiophene-fused porphyrin sensitizers and revealed that the DSSC of thiophene-fused porphyrin sensitizer achieved the highest power conversion efficiency ever reported for DSSCs with aromatic-fused porphyrin sensitizers. Furthermore, rational molecular design can realize further enhancement of the photovoltaic performance of the DSSCs with thiophene-fused porphyrin sensitizers.
Published Version
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