Mesoporous Bi2S3 nanorods with graphene-assistance as low-cost counter-electrode materials in dye-sensitized solar cells.

ABSTRACT

In this work, we report the synthesis of mesoporous Bi2S3 nanorods under hydrothermal conditions without additives, and investigated their catalytic activities as the CE in DSCs by I-V curves and tested conversion efficiency. To further improve their power conversion efficiency, we added different amounts of reduced graphene by simple physical mixing. With the addition of 9 wt% reduced graphene (rGO), the short-circuit current density, open-circuit voltage and fill factor were Jsc = 15.33 mA cm(-2), Voc = 0.74 V and FF = 0.609. More importantly, the conversion efficiency reached 6.91%, which is slightly inferior to the commercial Pt counter electrode (7.44%). Compared to the conventional Pt counter electrodes of solar cells, this new material has the advantages of low-cost, facile synthesis and high efficiency with graphene assistance. To the best of our knowledge, this Bi2S3 + 9 wt% rGO system has the best performance ever recorded in all Bi2S3-based CEs in the DSCs system.