Co-sensitization of free-base and zinc porphyrins: An effective approach to improve the photon-to-current conversion efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cells

Abstract

Co-sensitization of two or more sensitizers with complementary absorption profiles had been utilized as an imperative tool to achieve panchromatic sensitization in dye-sensitized solar cells. The highly efficient dye-sensitized solar cells consist of a co-sensitization system comprising of a mixture of porphyrin and organic dye. We have prepared four novel free-base and zinc porphyrins in minimum steps and examined their individual as well as co-sensitized performance in dye-sensitized solar cells. The UV-visible spectrum suggests that upon zinc insertion the absorption wavelength is red-shifted by 10 nm in both Soret and Q-band region. The density functional theory (DFT) calculations revealed that the presence of an electron withdrawing cyanoacrylic acid as the anchoring group has pronounced effect on the charge distribution. IPCE spectra suggest that the co-sensitization of a free-base porphyrin with a zinc porphyrin resulted in panchromatic absorption in whole visible region. The device made with Mix-2, which is composed from the free-base porphyrin N4CN and the zinc porphyrin N4ZnCN gave the best performance with an overall photon-to-current conversion efficiency of 4.18%, with Jsc of 10.4 mA.cm-2, Voc of 0.56 V and fill factor of 72%.