Scientia Iranica

Scientia Iranica

Low temperature dye-sensitized solar cells based on conformal thin zinc oxide overlayer on mesoporous insulating template by atomic layer deposition

Authors
Mojtaba Abdi-Jalebi 1
Aravind Kumar Chandiran 2
Mohammad. K. Nazeeruddin 2
Michael Grätzel 2
1 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, CH1015, Switzerland
2 Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, CH1015, Switzerland
Abstract
Low temperature processing of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) is essential to enable commercialization with low cost plastic substrates and diminish the overall manufacturing cost. We report a low temperature processing route for photoanodes where thin ZnO nanoshell is deposited by atomic layer deposition at 150°C, on a mesoporous insulating template. We found that a 6 nm ZnO overlayer on a 3 µm mesoporous nanoparticle Al2O3 template shows a power conversion efficiency of 4.3 % with the standard organic sensitizer (coded Y123) and cobalt bipyridine redox mediator.
Keywords
Dye-sensitized solar cell
Zinc oxide
atomic layer deposition
mesoporous template
photoanode
flexible solar cells
Scientia Iranica
Volume 21, Issue 6 - Serial Number 6
Transactions on Nanotechnology (F)
December 2014
Pages 2479-2484

  • Receive Date 05 January 2015
  • Accept Date 27 July 2017