Abstract
Efficient light harvesting is essential for the realization of high energy conversion efficiency in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). State-of-the-art mesoporous TiO2 photoanodes fall short for collection of long-wavelength visible light photons, and thus there have been efforts on introduction of scattering nanoparticles. Herein, we report the synthesis of wrinkled silica/titania nanoparticles with tunable interwrinkle distances as scattering materials for enhanced light harvesting in DSCs. These particles with more than 20 times larger specific surface area (>400 m2/g) compared to the spherical scattering particles (<20 m2/g) of the similar sizes gave rise to the dye-loading amounts, causing significant improvements in photocurrent density and efficiency. Moreover, dependence of spectral scattering properties of wrinkled particles on interwrinkle distances, which was originated from difference in overall refractive indices, was observed.
Highlights
Efficient light harvesting is essential for the realization of high energy conversion efficiency in dyesensitized solar cells (DSCs)
Wrinkled silica nanoparticles were synthesized in a bicontinuous microemulsion phase by hydrolysis and condensation of tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS)
In the short-wavelength region (
Summary
Efficient light harvesting is essential for the realization of high energy conversion efficiency in dyesensitized solar cells (DSCs). A few hundreds of nanometer sized scatterers such as cavities and photonic crystals were often employed[32,33,34,35,36,37], and TiO2 nanoparticles with similar dimension have generally manifested the finest performances[38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49] These light scattering TiO2 particles were incorporated within the photoelectrode by embedding them into the mesoscopic TiO2 layer[38,39,40] or by forming a layer composed of light scatterers[41,42,43,44,45,46,47]. Aerogel based silica/titania photoanodes and size controlled silica/titania scatterers with enhanced light harvesting properties for DSCs have been reported[50,51]
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