TITLE:
Green Approach for In-Situ Growth of CdS Nanorods in Low Band Gap Polymer Network for Hybrid Solar Cell Applications
AUTHORS:
Ramil K. Bhardwaj, Vishal Bharti, Abhishek Sharma, Dibyajyoti Mohanty, Vikash Agrawal, Nakul Vats, Gauri D. Sharma, Neeraj Chaudhary, Shilpa Jain, Jitender Gaur, Kamalika Banerjee, Suresh Chand
KEYWORDS:
CdS Nanorods, PTB7, In-Situ Growth, Solvothermal, Hybrid Solar Cell
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Nanoparticles,
Vol.3 No.3,
August
26,
2014
ABSTRACT: In-situ growth of CdS nanorods (NRs) has been
demonstrated via solvothermal, in a low band gap polymer, poly [[4,8-bis[(2-ethylhexyl)oxy]
benzo [1,2-b:4,5-b’] dithiophene-2,6-diyl] [3-fluoro-2-[(2-ethylhexyl) carbonyl]
thieno [3,4-b] thiophenediyl]] (PTB7). It is a high yielding, green approach as
it removes use of volatile and hazardous chemicals such as pyridine as ligand
which are conventionally used to synthesize precursors of CdS (NRs). Moreover
the solvothermal process is a zero emission process being a close vessel
synthesis and hence no material leaching into the atmosphere during the
synthesis. The PTB7:CdS nanocomposite has been characterized by SEM, XRD, FTIR,
UV-visible spectroscopy techniques. The photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy
study of PTB7 with CdS NRs has shown significant PL quenching by the
incorporation of CdS NRs in PTB7; this shows that CdS NRs are efficient
electron acceptors with the PTB7. The PTB7:CdS is used as active layer in the
fabrication of hybrid solar cells (HSC) as donor-acceptor combination in the
bulk heterojunction (BHJ) geometry. The HSCs fabricated using this active layer
without any additional supporting fullerene based electron acceptor has given
power conversion efficiency of above 1%.