Solvent Engineering for High-Performance PbS Quantum Dots Solar Cells

Rongfang Wu; Yuehua Yang; Miaozi Li; Donghuan Qin; Yangdong Zhang; Lintao Hou

doi:10.3390/nano7080201

Solvent Engineering for High-Performance PbS Quantum Dots Solar Cells

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2017 Jul 28;7(8):201. doi: 10.3390/nano7080201.

Authors

Rongfang Wu¹, Yuehua Yang², Miaozi Li³, Donghuan Qin⁴, Yangdong Zhang⁵, Lintao Hou⁶

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Polymer Optoelectronic Materials & Devices, State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials & Devices, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China. mswrf@mail.scut.edu.cn.
² Institute of Polymer Optoelectronic Materials & Devices, State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials & Devices, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China. sendiege@163.com.
³ School of Materials Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China. limz4994@sina.com.
⁴ Institute of Polymer Optoelectronic Materials & Devices, State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials & Devices, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China. qindh@scut.edu.cn.
⁵ Siyuan Laboratory, Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Vacuum Coating Technologies and New Energy Materials, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications, Department of Physics, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China. zhangyangdong@stu2014.jnu.edu.cn.
⁶ Siyuan Laboratory, Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Vacuum Coating Technologies and New Energy Materials, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications, Department of Physics, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China. thlt@jnu.edu.cn.

Abstract

PbS colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) solar cells have already demonstrated very impressive advances in recent years due to the development of many different techniques to tailor the interface morphology and compactness in PbS CQDs thin film. Here, n-hexane, n-octane, n-heptane, isooctane and toluene or their hybrids are for the first time introduced as solvent for comparison of the dispersion of PbS CQDs. PbS CQDs solar cells with the configuration of PbS/TiO₂ heterojunction are then fabricated by using different CQDs solution under ambient conditions. The performances of the PbS CQDs solar cells are found to be tuned by changing solvent and its content in the PbS CQDs solution. The best device could show a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 7.64% under AM 1.5 G illumination at 100 mW cm^-2 in a n-octane/isooctane (95%/5% v/v) hybrid solvent scheme, which shows a ~15% improvement compared to the control devices. These results offer important insight into the solvent engineering of high-performance PbS CQDs solar cells.

Keywords: PbS; colloidal quantum dots; solar cells; solvent engineering.