Alloy counter electrodes in dye-sensitizedsolar cells
2015
Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have gained widespread attention
of researchers in recent years due to their unique advantages, such
as low cost of production, ease of manufacturing and relatively high
power conversion efficiency. Traditionally, a DSSC has several components
including photoanode material, dyes, electrolytes and the counter
electrode (CE), which must cooperate intimately to transform incident
light into current. As a crucial part of DSSCs, designing CE with
excellent properties is a key to improve the power conversion efficiency
of DSSCs. As the good CE material, noble metal Pt material exhibiting
high catalytic activity and electrical conductivity has obtained high
power conversion efficiency in DSSCs. However, some problems of Pt,
especially high scarcity in the nature and the corrosivity of I – /I 3 – electrolyte, limit
its further application in DSSCs. Meanwhile, lots of Pt-free materials
involving carbon materials, transition metal compounds, polymers,
and hybrids have been developed as CE materials to solve the challenges
of the Pt-based DSSCs, and achieved favorable power conversion efficiency.
Recently, another novel type of alloy materials, which include Pt-based
and Pt-free alloys, show superior catalytic activity and have achieved
significant power conversion efficiency when applied as CEs in DSSCs.
The alloy materials have the merits of simple preparation process
and low cost and are the outstanding candidate to replace Pt in DSSCs.
The present review gives a summary of the alloy materials as CE in
DSSCs. We stress the advantages and disadvantages of alloy CE materials,
and put forward ideas for preparation methods, DSSCs’ designing,
ab-initio Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics simulations, first-principle
density functional theory calculations and stability evaluations in
future research for DSSCs featuring alloy CEs. Also, some crucial
issues in alloy-based DSSCs and the further applications of the alloy
materials in other field of catalysis are discussed.
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