Theoretical design and experimental synthesis of counter electrode for dye-sensitized solar cells: Amino-functionalized graphene

摘要

For some specific catalytic reaction,how to construct active sites on two dimensional materials is of great scientific significance.Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) can be viewed as one representative photovoltaics because in which liquid electrolyte with triiodide/iodide (I3-/I-) as redox couples are involved.In this study,amino-functionalized graphene (AFG) has been designed according to theoretically analyzing iodine reduction reaction (IRR) processes and rationally screening the volcanic plot.Then,such AFG has been successfully synthesized by a simple hydrothermal method and shows high electrocatalytic activity towards IRR when serving as counter electrode in DSCs.Finally,a high conversion efficiency of 7.39％ by AFG-based DSCs was obtained,which is close to that using Pt as counter electrode.