title: A new mussel-inspired polydopamine sensitizer for dye-sensitized solar cells: controlled synthesis and charge transfer.
abstract: The efficient electron injection by direct dye-to-TiO(2) charge transfer and strong adhesion of mussel-inspired synthetic polydopamine (PDA) dyes with TiO(2) electrode is demonstrated. Spontaneous self-polymerization of dopamine using dip-coating (DC) and cyclic voltammetry (CV) in basic buffer solution were applied to TiO(2) layers under a nitrogen atmosphere, which offers a facile and reliable synthetic pathway to make the PDA dyes, PDA-DC and PDA-CV, with conformal surface and perform an efficient dye-to-TiO(2) charge transfer. Both synthetic methods led to excellent photovoltaic results and the PDA-DC dye exhibited larger current density and efficiency values than those in the PDA-CV dye. Under simulated AM 1.5 G solar light (100 mW cm(-2)), a PDA-DC dye exhibited a short circuit current density of 5.50 mW cm(-2), corresponding to an overall power conversion efficiency of 1.2 %, which is almost 10 times that of the dopamine dye-sensitized solar cell. The PDA dyes showed strong adhesion with the nanocrystalline TiO(2) electrodes and the interface engineering of a dye-adsorbed TiO(2) surface through the control of the coating methods, reaction times and solution concentration maximized the overall conversion efficiency, resulting in a remarkably high efficiency.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Institute of Basic Sciences, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea.
authors.forename: Hye Jin
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Nam
authors.forename: Boeun
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Min Jae
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Ko
authors.forename: Mingshi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.forename: Ji Man
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Duk-Young
authors.initials: DY
authors.lastname: Jung