title: Engineering of a novel ruthenium sensitizer and its application in dye-sensitized solar cells for conversion of sunlight into electricity.
abstract: A novel ligand 4,4'-bis(carboxyvinyl)-2,2'-bipyridine (L) and its ruthenium(II) complex [Ru(II)L(2)(NCS)(2)] (K8) were synthesized and characterized by analytical, spectroscopic, and electrochemical techniques. The performance of the K8 complex as a charge transfer photosensitizer in nanocrystalline TiO(2) based solar cells was studied. When the K8 complex anchored onto a nanocrystalline TiO(2) film, we achieved very efficient sensitization yielding 77 +/-5% incident photon-to-current efficiencies (IPCE) in the visible region using an electrolyte consisting of 0.6 M methyl-N-butyl imidiazolium iodide, 0.05 M iodine, 0.05 M LiI, and 0.5 M 4-tert-butylpyridine in a 50/50 (v/v) mixture of valeronitrile and acetonitrile. Under standard AM 1.5 sunlight, the complex K8 gave a short circuit photocurrent density of 18 +/- 0.5 mA/cm(2), and the open circuit voltage was 640 +/- 50 mV with fill factor of 0.75 +/- 0.05, corresponding to an overall conversion efficiency of 8.64 +/- 0.5%.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Photonics and Interfaces, Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, School of Basic Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Klein
authors.forename: Md K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Nazeeruddin
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Liska
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Di Censo
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hirata
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Palomares
authors.forename: J R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Durrant
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Grätzel