Triblock‐Terpolymer‐Directed Self‐Assembly of Mesoporous TiO2: High‐Performance Photoanodes for Solid‐State Dye‐Sensitized Solar Cells |
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| Authors: | Pablo Docampo Morgan Stefik Stefan Guldin Robert Gunning Nataliya A. Yufa Ning Cai Peng Wang Ullrich Steiner Ulrich Wiesner Henry J. Snaith |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK;2. Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA;3. Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, J. J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK;4. State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, PR China |
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| Abstract: | A new self‐assembly platform for the fast and straightforward synthesis of bicontinuous, mesoporous TiO2 films is presented, based on the triblock terpolymer poly(isoprene ‐ b ‐ styrene ‐ b ‐ ethylene oxide). This new materials route allows the co‐assembly of the metal oxide as a fully interconnected minority phase, which results in a highly porous photoanode with strong advantages over the state‐of‐the‐art nanoparticle‐based photoanodes employed in solid‐state dye‐sensitized solar cells. Devices fabricated through this triblock terpolymer route exhibit a high availability of sub‐bandgap states distributed in a narrow and low enough energy band, which maximizes photoinduced charge generation from a state‐of‐the‐art organic dye, C220. As a consequence, the co‐assembled mesoporous metal oxide system outperformed the conventional nanoparticle‐based electrodes fabricated and tested under the same conditions, exhibiting solar power‐conversion efficiencies of over 5%. |
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| Keywords: | block copolymers dye‐sensitized mesoporous self‐assembly solid state |
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