Phd in ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE FOR ENERGY
AND INDUSTRY

Thesis title: New dyes for p-type Dye Sensitized Solar Cells: from Design to Device

In this PhD Thesis, I reported on the synthesis of two new dyes to be employed as sensitizers in p-type dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). The design of the two new molecules under consideration has been inspired by the state-of-art dye PMI-6T-TPA. In particular, a specific engineering of the thiophene-based central core is here considered to favour structural planarity between an oligothiophene π-spacer (a sexithiophene), and the acceptor and donor units made by peryleneimide (PMI) and triphenylamine (TPA) moieties, respectively. This leads to a wide absorption in the NIR with stabilization of the HOMO energy level in the resulting dyes, as supported by TD-DFT simulations and spectroscopic characterization. When tested as sensitizers in NiOx-based p-type DSCs, A6D (with an Acceptor-π-Donor structure) outperforms both its counterpart with a Donor-π-Donor structure (D6D) and P1, a benchmark dye in the ambit of p DSCs. With A6D dye-sensitizer the resulting DSC device presents the quite remarkable value of stabilized efficiency as high as 0.15% when I-/I3- is employed as redox couple and nanostructured NiOx photocathode is thick less than 1.5 m and does not contain any blocking material. Notwithstanding the panchromatic feature of the sensitizer, A6D-based devices show an average visible transmittance (AVT) of 8%. Such a result paves the way toward the application of these types of multifunctional dyes in semi-transparent solar cells.