Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SC4-P059
NANOSTRUCTURED ZnO-BASED DYE-SENSITIZED SOLAR CELLS
USING NOVEL ORGANIC DYES
Carlos Antonio Gonzalez Flores 1 , Alberto Gabriel Vega Poot 1 , Dena Pourjafari 1 , Beatriz Eugenia
Heredia Cervera 1 , Jesús Idígoras 2 , Juan Antonio Anta 2 , Gerko Oskam 1
1
CINVESTAV-Mérida, Física Aplicada, Mexico. 2 Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sistemas Físicos,
Químicos y Naturales, Spain.
ZnO is an attractive material for application in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC),
because it has very good transport properties and it can be synthesized by a
large number of methods; however, it is well known that the dyes optimized for
TiO2 do not work well with ZnO, mainly because of the instability of ZnO in acidic
dye sensitizing solutions. In addition, it is more complicated to avoid a low
amount of dye adsorbed to the films, thus allowing for relatively rapid electron
transfer from ZnO to the electrolyte solution, being the main recombination
process.
In this work, we explore new metal-free, organic dyes as an alternative to Rubased
dyes for the fabrication of efficient ZnO-based DSSC: we have used
benzothiadiazole-based dyes (abbreviated as YKP88, RK1, DJ214 and YKP89) and
compared their performances. The ZnO nanomaterial was synthetized by a
microwave-assisted solvothermal method: the nanoparticle size was around 30
nm, with spherical morphology. The films were prepared by screen-printing and
DSSC were fabricated with 0.5 cm 2 active area. The DSSC were characterized
under 1 sun illumination, and the efficiency was measured. Intensity-modulated
photocurrent spectroscopy (IMPS) and intensity-modulated photovoltage
spectroscopy (IMVS) were applied to make a comparative study of the electronic
transport and the recombination in the cells using different dyes. DSSC with the
YKP-88 dye of 0.5 cm 2 with an efficiency of 4.8% and a solar mini-module of 19
cm 2 with an efficiency of 2% have been achieved. The advantages and
disadvantages of each dye and the performances of DSSC built with these dyes
are discussed.
Keywords: screen-printing, ZnO, dye sensitized solar cells
Presenting authors email: carlosgonzalez132010@hotmail.com