Preparation of shell hollow spheres advances or improves solar cell efficiency

Due to the large internal space and shell thickness in the nanoscale range, the multi-shell hollow sphere has a wide application prospect in the fields of optoelectronic devices, catalysis, chemical sensors, drug delivery, energy conversion, and storage systems. A few days ago, on the basis of past achievements, the Research Group and its collaborators of the Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences further developed the “temporal and spatial multi-scale template method”, starting from the adsorption of carbon spheres of metal ions, through heat treatment methods and precursors. The concentration of body solution was controlled to achieve the control of the number of shell layers and shell spacing of zinc oxide shells.

The results show that the photoelectric energy conversion efficiency of the dye-sensitized solar cell prepared with this material not only increases with the increase of the number of hollow shells, but also has a close relationship with the shell spacing. The outermost two shell layers of adjacent multi-shell hollow spheres have higher energy conversion efficiency than the solar cells prepared by shell layers of randomly distributed multi-shell hollow spheres. This is due to the fact that the outer shells of adjacent multi-shell hollow spheres not only have a larger surface area, can adsorb more dye molecules, but also enhance the light scattering of the material, the path of light in the material grows, the dye molecules The probability of absorbing light increases accordingly.

This achievement has opened up a new way for the design and development of photoelectrode materials for efficient dye-sensitized solar cells. The relevant research results were published in the international journal "Advanced Materials."