Enhancement of Photovoltaic Properties of Ti-modified Nanocrystalline ZnO Electrode for Dye-sensitized Solar Cell

Nano-porous semiconducting materials have been an intensive research field for many photovoltaic (PV) applications. The Gratzel-type dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is one of the important devices of those applications. Using TiO2 nanocrystalline electrode, it achieved recently the best energy conversion efficiency (η) as high as 11%. ZnO has similar electronic properties with TiO2 including conduction band (CB) position and band gap, so it has been also regarded as a good candidate for DSSC. Moreover, various simple and effective synthetic routes have been developed for nanocrystalline ZnO materials, while the optimized nanocrystalline TiO2 colloid can be prepared only through the hydrothermal method until now. Nevertheless, ZnObased DSSCs showed PV properties much inferior to TiO2based devices, though some systems using big particles exhibit slightly improved properties. For instance, Fitzmaurice

[1]  Marc A. Anderson,et al.  Vectorial electron injection into transparent semiconductor membranes and electric field effects on the dynamics of light-induced charge separation , 1990 .

[2]  Marc A. Anderson,et al.  Semiconductor clusters in the sol-gel process: quantized aggregation, gelation, and crystal growth in concentrated zinc oxide colloids , 1991 .

[3]  J. L. Baptista,et al.  Characteristics of zinc oxide powders precipitated in the presence of alcohols and amines , 1993 .

[4]  D. Fitzmaurice,et al.  Visible Light Sensitization by cis-Bis(thiocyanato)bis(2,2"-bipyridyl-4,4"-dicarboxylato)ruthenium(II) of a Transparent Nanocrystalline ZnO Film Prepared by Sol-Gel Techniques , 1994 .

[5]  S. Hotchandani,et al.  Photosensitization of Nanocrystalline ZnO Films by Bis(2,2‘-bipyridine)(2,2‘-bipyridine-4,4‘-dicarboxylic acid)ruthenium(II) , 1997 .

[6]  A. Naito,et al.  High-resolution solid-state 13 C and 15 N NMR study on crystalline leu- and met-enkephalins , 1998 .

[7]  Chunhui Huang,et al.  A HIGHLY EFFICIENT SOLAR CELL MADE FROM A DYE-MODIFIED ZNO-COVERED TIO2 NANOPOROUS ELECTRODE , 2001 .

[8]  Anders Hagfeldt,et al.  Nanostructured ZnO electrodes for dye-sensitized solar cell applications , 2002 .

[9]  T. Lian,et al.  Electron Injection Dynamics from Ru Polypyridyl Complexes to ZnO Nanocrystalline Thin Films , 2003 .

[10]  Man Gu Kang,et al.  Photovoltaic characteristics of dye-sensitized surface-modified nanocrystalline SnO2 solar cells , 2004 .

[11]  Michael Grätzel,et al.  Conversion of sunlight to electric power by nanocrystalline dye-sensitized solar cells , 2004 .