Synergetic Effects of Hybrid Carbon Nanostructured Counter Electrodes for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells: A Review

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the structural and physicochemical properties of stable carbon-based nanomaterials and their applications as counter electrodes (CEs) in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The research community has long sought to harvest highly efficient third-generation DSSCs by developing carbon-based CEs, which are among the most important components of DSSCs. Since the initial introduction of DSSCs, Pt-based electrodes have been commonly used as CEs owing to their high-electrocatalytic activities, thus, accelerating the redox couple at the electrode/electrolyte interface to complete the circuit. However, Pt-based electrodes have several limitations due to their cost, abundance, complicated facility, and low corrosion resistance in a liquid electrolyte, which further restricts the large-area applications of DSSCs. Although carbon-based nanostructures showed the best potential to replace Pt-CE of DSSC, several new properties and characteristics of carbon-CE have been reported for future enhancements in this field. In this review, we discuss the detailed synthesis, properties, and performances of various carbonaceous materials proposed for DSSC-CE. These nano-carbon materials include carbon nanoparticles, activated carbon, carbon nanofibers, carbon nanotube, two-dimensional graphene, and hybrid carbon material composites. Among the CE materials currently available, carbon-carbon hybridized electrodes show the best performance efficiency (up to 10.05%) with a high fill factor (83%). Indeed, up to 8.23% improvements in cell efficiency may be achieved by a carbon-metal hybrid material under sun condition. This review then provides guidance on how to choose appropriate carbon nanomaterials to improve the performance of CEs used in DSSCs.

Organic Functionalized Carbon Nanostructures for Solar Energy Conversion

“…The strong interest in the use of CNSs in general to improve performances of DSSCs is indeed indicated by a quick increase in reports in the past year [ 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 ].…”

Graphene-Based Material for Fabrication of Electrodes in Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

“…As a positive electrode of primary cells, the cathode collects electrons from the external circuit and transfers electrons into the cell. As a mirror, unabsorbed light came through the photoanode and the electrolyte, which was partially reflected in the cell to enhance the utilization of the light [5,31].…”

Free-Standing N-Doped Porous Carbon Fiber Membrane Derived From Zn–MOF-74: Synthesis and Application as Anode for Sodium-Ion Battery With an Excellent Performance

“…Up until now, the anode materials for SIBs mainly include alloys (Jena et al, 2020;Zheng et al, 2020), metal phosphide (Cui et al, 2016;Fang K. et al, 2020), metal oxides (Jian et al, 2014;Zhao et al, 2015), metal sulfides (Chen et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2020;Zhao W. et al, 2020), and carbon materials (Flores et al, 2018;Kumaresan et al, 2020;Shan et al, 2020). Among them, carbon materials are one of the more promising materials for SIBs because of their excellent electrical conductivity, chemical stability, high energy density, and low cost (Hassan et al, 2020;Samantaray et al, 2020;Sánchez-Romate et al, 2020;. Graphite is the most successful carbon material in the study of lithiumion batteries, but, as mentioned above, the diameter of Na + is large, so it is difficult to embed/detach from graphite.…”