Issue 32, 2012

CdSe-sensitized mesoscopic TiO2 solar cells exhibiting >5% efficiency: redundancy of CdS buffer layer

Abstract

Semiconductor-sensitized TiO2 solar cells employing CdSe as a light absorber demonstrate superior photovoltaic performance to the best-performing cascaded CdS/CdSe cells with practically identical optical density in the study. A careful comparison between CdSe and CdS/CdSe sensitized cells reveals that while CdS can greatly promote the subsequent growth of CdSe in the cascade electrodes and hence light harvesting, the presence of a CdS buffer layer impedes the injection of electrons from CdSe to TiO2 and accelerates charge recombination at the TiO2/sensitizer interface. As a result, better performance was achieved with CdSe-sensitized solar cells when light absorption is identical to that of CdS/CdSe cells, making the CdS buffer layer redundant. CdSe-sensitized TiO2 solar cells incorporating light scattering layers and an aqueous polysulfide electrolyte yielded an unprecedented power conversion efficiency of up to 5.21% under simulated AM 1.5, 100 mW cm−2 illumination.

Graphical abstract: CdSe-sensitized mesoscopic TiO2 solar cells exhibiting >5% efficiency: redundancy of CdS buffer layer

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
20 May 2012
Accepted
21 Jun 2012
First published
25 Jun 2012

J. Mater. Chem., 2012,22, 16235-16242

CdSe-sensitized mesoscopic TiO2 solar cells exhibiting >5% efficiency: redundancy of CdS buffer layer

Md. A. Hossain, J. R. Jennings, C. Shen, J. H. Pan, Z. Y. Koh, N. Mathews and Q. Wang, J. Mater. Chem., 2012, 22, 16235 DOI: 10.1039/C2JM33211F

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