Salen Zn complexes along with ZnO nanowires for dye sensitized solar cells

Abstract

Zn Schiff based complexes with high conductivity were synthesized with a facile approach at low cost. As dye sensitizers, Zn complexes have been attempted to construct dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), along with vertically aligned ZnO nanowires as a scaffold and an electron transporting layer for more dye load and better electron transporting pathways. The power conversion efficiency was examined by the I-V curve. Compared with the solar devices based on conventional TiO 2 nanoparticles with an efficiency of 0.815%, the solar cells with ZnO nanowires outperform greatly, with a much better efficiency of 3.68%, which holds a great potential for the widespread applications in dye sensitized solar cells devices.

Effect of regio-specific arylamine substitution on novel π-extended zinc salophen complexes: density functional and time-dependent density functional study on DSSC applications

“…Interestingly, although the porphyrin-based dyes featuring N,N,N,N-tetradentate molecular framework have been extensively investigated, studies relating structurally resembled dyes based on O,N,N,O-tetradentate salophen-type Schiff-based metal complex are found rare. [40][41][42][43] The metal-salophen complexes have strong UV-Vis absorption with broad spectral coverage which meet the principal criteria of a light harvesting photosensitizer. 28 In addition, the molecular properties can be easily manipulated via tuning the frontier molecular orbitals, charge-transfer characteristics, and probably other intermolecular interactions and potential catalytic properties.…”