Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
Nanoscale. 2012 Mar 7;4(5):1436-45. doi: 10.1039/c2nr11595f. Epub 2011 Dec 23.
Oxide nanowire arrays were studied for their applications to solar cells. It was demonstrated that the nanowires could provide direct pathways for electron transport in dye-sensitized solar cells and therefore, while forming photoelectrode films, they offered better suppression of charge recombination than nanoparticles. However, the photoelectron films consisting of nanowires suffered a disadvantage in giving large surface area for dye adsorption. Such a shortcoming of nanowires had been exemplified in this paper illustrating that it could be well compensated by incorporating with nanoparticles to form a nanoparticle-nanowire array hybrid photoelectrode film. The oxide nanowires were also demonstrated to be able to enhance the performance of inverted structure polymer solar cells as a cathode buffer layer by establishing a large interface with the polymers so as to facilitate the transport of photogenerated electrons from the polymer to the electron collecting electrode. Such an enhancement effect could be further boosted while the nanowires were replaced with nanotubes; the latter may build up larger interface with the polymers than the former and therefore facilitates the electron transport more efficiently.
研究了氧化物纳米线阵列在太阳能电池中的应用。研究表明，纳米线可以为染料敏化太阳能电池中的电子传输提供直接途径，因此，在形成光电电极薄膜时，纳米线比纳米粒子更能有效地抑制电荷复合。然而，由纳米线组成的光电电子薄膜在提供染料吸附的大表面积方面存在劣势。本文通过示例说明了这一缺点，即通过与纳米粒子结合形成纳米粒子-纳米线阵列混合光电电极薄膜，可以很好地弥补这一缺点。研究还表明，氧化物纳米线作为阴极缓冲层，可以通过与聚合物建立大的界面，促进光生电子从聚合物向电子收集电极的传输，从而提高倒置结构聚合物太阳能电池的性能。而当纳米线被替换为纳米管时，这种增强效果可以进一步提高；与前者相比，后者可能与聚合物建立更大的界面，从而更有效地促进电子传输。
