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Incorporating plasmonic nanostructures is a promising strategy to enhance both the optical and electrical characteristics of photovoltaic devices via more efficient harvesting of incident light. Herein, we report a facile fabrication scheme at low temperature for producing gold nanoparticles embedded in anatase TiO 2 films, which can simultaneously improve the efficiency and stability of n–i–p planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells (PSCs). The PSCs based on rigid and flexible substrates with 0.2 wt % Au–TiO 2 /TiO 2 dual electron transport layers (ETLs) achieved power conversion efficiencies up to 20.31 and 15.36%, superior to that of devices with TiO 2 as a single ETL. Moreover, 0.2 wt % Au–TiO 2 /TiO 2 devices demonstrated significant stability in light soaking, which is attributed to improved light absorption, low charge recombination loss, and enhanced carrier transport, and extraction with the plasmonic Au–TiO 2 /TiO 2 dual ETL. The present work improves the practicability of high-performance and flexible PSCs by engineering the photogenerated carrier dynamics at the interface.

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As a platform to mix the bioagents (i.e. serum, urine), we take advantage of the alternating current electrothermal (ACET) effect which is quite suitable for rapid pumping/mixing of high conductive biomicrofluids. Here we demonstrate the concept of a high-efficient mixing microfluidic chip as a basic unit to provide rapid mixing for lab-on-a-chip applications. As an active mixer, two streams are introduced into a ring-shape microchamber by a passive flow rate regulator, and then the microfluids in the chamber are actuated by a nonuniform electric field with a phase shift of 180°. It shows perfect mixing performance by arranging four arc-electrodes around the ring-shape microchamber subsequently. Taking the Joule heating and conductivity/permittivity changes into consideration, a temperature dependent fully coupled numerical model is presented. Then, the effects of applied voltages on mixing performance and temperature rise are provided to get an optimized design for ACET mixer. Moreover, the arrangement of the electrode array is analyzed to show the effects of electrode patterns on the swirls and mixing efficiencies. Since all the electrodes here are located along a ring-shape central microchamber, the ring-shape micromixer is quite suitable to function as a compact element modular for integrated microfluidic chips.