Synthesis of 1D semiconductors for application in dye-sensitized solar cells
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Leidich, Patrick
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Abstract
Initiated by their outstanding efficiency and concomitant low-cost, dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) represent a large field of research nowadays, as they also have a high potential for further industrial applications. DSCs show many interesting features, such that they are printable on transparent foil, which makes then light and flexible, and might enable them to be used in every-day items and therefore, they can also find application as portable power-supplies. All DSCs exhibit a photo-anode, consisting of a porous semiconductor and a dye, an electrolyte needed for regeneration of the dye, and two electrodes for charge collection. Several materials are suitable for the photo-anodes, important is not only the used compound, but also the morphology of the employed particles plays a crucial role for the efficiency of the DSC. On the one hand, the morphology has to exhibit a high surface area for dye adsorption, and, on the other hand, enable an efficient pathway to release the electrons from the device.
The present work focusses on the synthesis of such anisotropic semiconductors that enable the DSC to extract higher currents from the photo-anode. More precisely, this work is divided into two parts, the first aimed to investigate the growth of anisotropic micro- and nanostructured TiO2 and SnO2 as well as hybrid structures to combine the advantageous material’s properties of TiO2 and SnO2. In the second part, these nanostructures were incorporated into photo-anodes and the impact of the anisotropic structures on the efficiency was tested.