Fabrication of dye-sensitized solar cells based on push-pull asymmetrical substituted zinc and copper phthalocyanines and reduced graphene oxide nanosheets

Abstract

Dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) were fabricated by using 2(3,5-biscarboxyphenoxy), 9(10), 16(17), 23(24)-tri(tertbutyl) phthalocyaninato Cu (4) and Zn (5) complexes as dyes on the ITO-TiO2 photoanodes containing reduced graphene oxide nanosheets (rGONS) or nitrogen-doped rGONS (NrGONS). The evaluation of the assembled DSSCs revealed that using ITO-TiO2-NrGONS-CuPc photoanode had the highest fill factor (FF) and power conversion efficiency (ɳ) of 69% and 4.36% respectively. These results show that the asymmetrical phthalocyanine complexes (4) and (5) exhibit significant improvement on the performance of the DSSC compared to our previous work on symmetrical carboxylated phthalocyanines with ɳ = 3.19%.