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Fabrication a thin nickel oxide layer on photoanodes for control of charge recombination in dye-sensitized solar cells

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Abstract

A thin NiO layer (∼164 nm in thickness) is fabricated on the surface of TiO2 photoanode by a simple hydrothermal method. The TiO2/NiO photoanode prepared on the hydrothermal temperature of 100 °C (TiO2/NiO-100) shows enhancement of light-harvesting ability and excellent dye adsorption amount. Moreover, the intensity-modulated photovoltage spectroscopy, intensity-modulated photocurrent spectroscopy and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurements illustrate that the NiO layer makes the dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) with TiO2/NiO photoanodes shorten electron transport time, lengthen electron lifetime and obtain a higher charge collection efficiency than that of DSSCs with TiO2 photoanodes. Hence, the TiO2/NiO photoanode can efficiently decrease the electron transport resistance and charge recombination action. The DSSCs with TiO2/NiO-100 have an improvement photovoltaic performance and can obtain a higher value of power conversion efficiency (8.93 ± 0.34%) than that of DSSCs with TiO2 photoanodes (8.17 ± 0.33%) under full sunlight illumination (100 mW cm−2, AM 1.5 G).

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 91422301, U1205112, 21301060, 61306077 and 61474047).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Engineering Research Center of Environment-Friendly Functional Materials, Ministry of Education, Institute of Materials Physical Chemistry, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Photoelectric Functional Materials, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou, 362021, China

    Jinghao Huo, Yongguang Tu, Min Zheng & Jihuai Wu

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  1. Jinghao Huo
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  2. Yongguang Tu
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  3. Min Zheng
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Correspondence to Jihuai Wu.

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Huo, J., Tu, Y., Zheng, M. et al. Fabrication a thin nickel oxide layer on photoanodes for control of charge recombination in dye-sensitized solar cells. J Solid State Electrochem 21, 1523–1531 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10008-017-3515-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10008-017-3515-5

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