Highly conjugated electron rich thiophene antennas on phenothiazine and phenoxazine-based sensitizers for dye sensitized solar cells

Four new organic dyes, coded as CSORG6, CSORG7, CSORG8 and CSORG9, comprising electron rich thiophene derivatives as antennas and cyanoacrylic acid as acceptor, bridged by phenothiazine or phenoxazine were designed and synthesized for dye-sensitized solar cells applications. They were fully characterized with their photophysical, electrochemical properties, density functional theory (DFT), time dependent density DFT (TDDFT) and the light-harvesting properties of the new sensitizers were evaluated with nanocrystalline TiO2-based devices. Among the four diheteroanthracene based dyes, phenoxazine (CSORG7 and CSORG9) based devices afforded the best photovoltaic performance (eta) of 6% under standard AM 1.5G solar irradiation, whereas, N719 showed (eta) 6.4% under the similar fabrication and evolution conditions. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.