Mesoporous Bi₂S₃ nanorods with graphene-assistance as low-cost counter-electrode materials in dye-sensitized solar cells.

In this work, we report the synthesis of mesoporous Bi₂S₃ nanorods under hydrothermal conditions without additives, and investigated their catalytic activities as the CE in DSCs by I-V curves and tested conversion efficiency. To further improve their power conversion efficiency, we added different amounts of reduced graphene by simple physical mixing. With the addition of 9 wt% reduced graphene (rGO), the short-circuit current density, open-circuit voltage and fill factor were Jsc = 15.33 mA cm(-2), Voc = 0.74 V and FF = 0.609. More importantly, the conversion efficiency reached 6.91%, which is slightly inferior to the commercial Pt counter electrode (7.44%). Compared to the conventional Pt counter electrodes of solar cells, this new material has the advantages of low-cost, facile synthesis and high efficiency with graphene assistance. To the best of our knowledge, this Bi₂S₃ + 9 wt% rGO system has the best performance ever recorded in all Bi₂S₃-based CEs in the DSCs system.