Polyoxometalate modified all-weather solar cells for energy harvesting

Abstract

With the reduction of available non-renewable energy sources, the full use of renewable energy is particularly important, especially solar energy. The traditional dye-sensitized solar cells can only work during daytime, but never at night. In this work, H3 [α-PW12O40]·21H2O (PW12) is first introduced to the all-weather solar cell as the electronic transmission medium for decreasing the electron recombination caused by the weak fluorescence of the long persistence phosphors (LPPs) at night. Meanwhile, we fabricated an all-weather solar cell for the first time by adding a smaller amount of long persistence phosphors (LPPs) to the photo-anode, which can absorb the solar energy at daytime then transfer the energy to fluorescence at night, so the dye (N719) can absorb the fluorescence produced by LPP to continually generate electricity for achieving the aim of all-weather power generation. In general, our all-weather DSSC yields the maximum photoelectric conversion efficiency (PCE) 6.9% at daytime. The values of Jsc, Voc and Pmax are 0.28 mA cm−2, 500 mV and 79.8 μW cm−2 at night.