Enhancement of monobasal solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells with polymer electrolyte assembling imidazolium iodide-functionalized silica nanoparticles

An alkyl imidazolium iodide-functionalized silica (SiO2-ImI)/PEO/PVDF nano-composite polymer electrolyte (CPE) is developed for the monobasal solid-state dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) based on a printable carbon counter electrode. The results indicate that the alkyl imidazolium iodide chemically engineered onto the surface of silica, and that the SiO2-ImI can be distributed more uniformly in the PEO/PVDF polymer matrix than bare SiO2 nanoparticles. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) tests reveal that the conductivity of SiO2-ImI CPE is greatly increased compared with pure polymer electrolyte or the bare SiO2 CPE. As a result, the highest ionic conductivity of 1.07 x 10(-4) S cm-I and a power conversion efficiency of 3.83% is obtained at AM 1.5 and 100 mW cm(-2) with the 8 wt% SiO2-ImI CPE based monobasal solid-state DSSCs. Moreover, the preliminary stability tests indicate that SiO2-ImI CPE based monobasal solid-state DSSCs present better stability than bare SiO2 CPE devices. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.