Enhanced Electron Transport in Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Using Short ZnO Nanotips on A Rough Metal Anode

By Yang, Zhenzhen; Xu, Tao; Ito, Yasuo; Welp, Ulrich & Kwok, Wai Kwong
Published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C NULL 2009

Abstract

Many efforts have been directed toward the enhancement of electron transport in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) using one-dimensional nanoarchitectured semiconductors. However, the improvement resulting from these ordered 1-D nanostructured electrodes is often offset or diminished by the deterioration in other device parameters intrinsically associated with the use of these 1-D nanostrucutres, such as the two-sided effect of the length of the nanowires impacting the series resistance and roughness factor. In this work, we mitigate this problem by allocating part of the roughness factor to the collecting anode instead of imparting all the roughness factors onto the semiconductor layer attached to the anode. A microscopically rough Zn microtip array is used as an electron-collecting anode on which ZnO nanotips are grown to serve as the semiconductor component of the DSSC. For the same surface roughness factor, our Zn-microtip|ZnO-nanotip DSSC exhibits an enhanced fill factor compared with DSSCs that have ZnO nanowires supported by a planar anode. In addition, the open-circuit voltage of the Zn-microtip|ZnO-nanotip DSSC is also improved due to a favorable band shift at the Zn-ZnO interface, which raises the Fermi level of the semiconductor and consequently enlarges the energy gap between the quasi-Fermi level of ZnO and the redox species. With these improvements, the overall efficiency becomes 1.4% with an open-circuit voltage of 770 mV, while the surface roughness factor of ZnO is approximately 60. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopic study reveals that the electron collection time is much shorter than the electron lifetime, suggesting that fast electron collection occurs in our device due to the significantly reduced electron collection distance along the short ZnO nanotips. The overall improvement demonstrates a new approach to enhance the efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cells.

Read Article » Back