Efficient dye-sensitized solar cells based on TiO2 nanoparticles and skein-like nanotubes: Effect of arrangement modes of the layers and TiCl4 treatment

• Mixed skein-like nanotubes and nanoparticles were employed for DSSC fabrication.
• Such mixture exhibits superior light scattering effect.
• Double-layer DSSCs showed faster electron transfer and slower charge recombination.
• TiCl4 post-treated electrodes had high internal resistance and low dye loading.
• Double-layer photoanode under TiCl4 pre-treatment enhanced efficiency up to 7.88%.

Herein, we report a double-layer photoanode electrode composed of TiO2 nanoparticles active layer and a mixture of nanoparticles and newly proposed skein-like nanotubes (NTs) top layer. Such structure performs well in solar light harvesting due to first, the top layer exhibits superior light scattering and second, the active layer with high dye-loading can make better use of the back-scattered light. The results reveal that 30–40 nm nanoparticles have anatase structure, whereas 5–7 µm skein-like NTs show a mixture of anatase and rutile phases. Photovoltaic measurements demonstrate that by tuning mass ratio between nanoparticles and skein-like NTs, the cells based on single-layer photoanode without pre- and post-treatment with TiCl4 solution exhibits an optimum solar efficiency of 6.99%. Furthermore, the cells based on double-layer photoanodes show faster interfacial electron transfer and slower charge recombination process than that based on single-layer photoanodes. These advantages incorporated with employment of TiCl4 treatment render the cells based on double-layer photoanode exhibiting superior performance under AM1.5G simulated solar irradiation. As an example, TiCl4 pre-treated cell composed equal content of nanoparticles and skein-like NTs in the top layer and pure nanoparticles in the active layer shows cell efficiency of 7.88%.

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