1. Self-organized cholesteric liquid crystal polymer films with tunable photonic band gap as transparent and flexible back-reflectors for dye-sensitized solar cells
- Author
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Xingzhong Zhao, Jian Sun, Wan-Sheng Xiong, Qian Wang, Yun Jiang, Yumin Liu, Huai Yang, and Li Yu
- Subjects
Photocurrent ,Materials science ,Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment ,business.industry ,Cholesteric liquid crystal ,Photovoltaic system ,Energy conversion efficiency ,02 engineering and technology ,010402 general chemistry ,021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology ,01 natural sciences ,0104 chemical sciences ,Dye-sensitized solar cell ,Optoelectronics ,General Materials Science ,Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,0210 nano-technology ,business ,Absorption (electromagnetic radiation) ,Optical path length ,Photonic crystal - Abstract
Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) have attracted widespread attention in recent years, attributed to their low production costs, facile fabrication and tunable optical properties. In order to achieve competitive conversion efficiencies, the sunlight harvesting capacities of DSCs should be improved over a broad range of wavelengths and incidence angle. Here, we demonstrate a facile strategy to enhance the light absorptions of the devices via employing self-organized cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) polymer films as transparent and flexible back-reflectors for DSCs. The photonic band gap of these CLC films can be precisely tailored by modulating the helical pitch and twist sense. The selective light reflection of these CLC films gives rise to the possibility for increasing the optical path length of the light in particular wavelength region while retaining the cell transparency. The enhancement of photocurrent and power conversion efficiency (PCE) reveals strong wavelength dependence owing to the selective reflection of these CLC polymer films. The DSCs with proper combination of CLC back-reflectors yield the maximum enhancement over 21% in photocurrent and 17% in PCE. The work presented here provides new insights into the design of cell geometry for achieving extra absorption enhancement, which can also be compatible with other photovoltaic concepts.
- Published
- 2016