Manipulation of light harvesting for efficient dye-sensitized solar cell by doping an ultraviolet light-capturing fluorophore

摘要

An organic fluorophore is doped into a mesoporous TiO2 photoelectrode to absorb ultraviolet light and convert it to green light for more efficient light harvesting of N719 dye. This fluorescence conversion enables the absorption of additional green light by dye molecules by means of Forster resonance energy transfer between fluorescent compound donor and N719 dye acceptor. Owing to close fit between the emission peak of fluorophore and the absorption peak of N719 dye, the Forster resonance energy transfer effect enhances the incident photon to current conversion efficiency of the dye-sensitized solar cells based on fluorophore-doped TiO2 photoelectrodes. Improved power conversion efficiency (8.03-8.13%) is also achieved for the fluorophore-doped (10(-4) M) dye-sensitized solar cells compared with a cell without the doping of fluorophore (7.63%). Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.