Abstract

The technical bottleneck of carbon materials as counter electrodes (CEs) lies in their limited electrical conductivity, extended ion diffusion paths, poor dispersion, and high contact resistance. Problem-oriented in-situ self-grown N-doped CNTs-coated Ni nanoparticles based on N-doped carbonaceous structures derived from pitaya peel (PC) are adopted to construct Ni-N-C hybrid 3D ionized network sites (Ni@NCNTs/PC-4) as CEs. Structural characterization, micromorphological and chemical composition analyses revealed the 3D network structure of Ni@NCNTs/PC-4 with abundant active sites. They effectively shorten the diffusion distance of I3− ions with a smaller charge transfer resistance (5.21 Ω) than that of PC (12.53 Ω). DSSCs based on Ni@NCNTs/PC-4 display good optoelectronic properties, in which the short-circuit current density (Jsc) is 13.27 mA/cm2, higher than those of Pt (11.66 mA/cm2) and PC (6.99 mA/cm2). The PCE value (5.13%) of DSSCs based on Ni@NCNTs/PC-4 is also higher than that of DSSCs based on PC (2.47%). Overall, this work provides a preliminary research and new ideas for further in-depth study of biomass-derived 3D structured-carbons that contribute to key electrodes in DSSCs.

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