Conjugated Polymer:TiO 2 Nanocomposite Solar Cells Based on P3HT Nanoparticles
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Conjugated Polymer:TiO2 Nanocomposite Solar Cells Based on P3HT Nanoparticles B. Harihara Venkatraman1, Akshay Kokil2, Soumitra Satapathi2, Jayant Kumar2, and Dhandapani Venkataraman1*. 1 Department of Chemistry, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, U.S.A. 2 Center for Advanced Materials and Department of Physics & Applied Physics, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854, U.S.A. ABSTRACT There is widespread interest in developing efficient solar cells derived from conjugated polymers and TiO2. The conjugated polymer can act as a light harvesting dye as well as a hole transport material, and can potentially replace both the ruthenium dye and the I3-/I- couple in the DSSCs. Herein, we report a novel and facile approach of using conjugated polymer nanoparticles to make conjugated polymer:TiO2 nanocomposite based solar cell. Nanoparticles from poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) were made using mini-emulsion technique. In this work we report on incorporation of these P3HT nanoparticles into nanoporous titania. Device characteristics made using P3HT nanoparticle sensitized solar cells were measured. These devices showed a short-circuit current density (Jsc) of 0.207 mA/cm2, open-circuit voltage (Voc) of 0.62 V and 0.07% (Ș) efficiency. INTRODUCTION Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) with liquid electrolytes have been considered as potential alternative for expensive silicon based solar cells [1]. Power conversion efficiencies of about 11% have been reported in DSSCs [2]. Recently, a lot of research has been focused on improving the performance of DSSC using dyes derived from organic molecules and exploiting conjugated polymer as a hole transport material, instead of the corrosive liquid electrolyte [3]. It has also been recognized that complete filling of the pores in TiO2 is important for higher efficiency[4, 5]. Typically, organometallic ruthenium complexes have been utilized as sensitizing dyes. Conjugated polymers have also been utilized as sensitizers for DSSCs and encouraging results have been reported [6-11]. However, since the diffusion of the conjugated polymers in the nanoporous electrode and their adsorption on the nanocrystalline TiO2 is not adequate, the efficiencies obtained using the conjugated polymer sensitizer have been limited. Therefore, it is necessary to devise a general strategy for filling the pores in titania that can be applied to any conjugated polymers or dyes. Herein, we discuss a new strategy of using dye nanoparticles (NP), instead of just dye molecules for infiltration (Figure 1). As a proof of concept, we show here the performance of solar cells sensitized with conjugated polymer nanoparticles since solar cells sensitized with conjugated polymer have been widely reported [6-11]. For the initial experiments, we utilized poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) due to its oxidative stability as well as its large exciton migration length (~ 10 nm).
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Figure 1: Representation of sensitized solar cell with infiltrated dye nanoparticle Nanocrystalline TiO2 with different part
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