| Abstract
| - Sol−gel-derived nanocrystalline TiO2 thin films with controlled and structured mesoporosity have been prepared to elaborate on a new generation of solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells. With use of a regioregular poly(3-octylthiophene) as hole conductor, the solar conversion efficiency has been studied as a function of the TiO2 network crystallinity and mesostructure.
- Nanocrystalline mesostructured porous titania thin films with optimized coating and thermal curingconditions have been prepared for the first time using spin-coating deposition technique. The X-raydiffraction (XRD) and the grazing incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GI-SAXS) measurementsrevealed that the crystallization and diffuse sintering of amorphous TiO2 into anatase are simultaneouslystarting between 400 and 500 °C curing temperature, leading to a gridlike open-pore-shape transformation.The environmental ellipsometric porosimetry (EEP) measurements show that the 550 °C-cured TiO2films exhibit a high porous volume (0.30 cm3 g-1), a large surface area (172 m2 cm-3), and a Youngmodulus of 1.05 GPa. All solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) based on nanocrystallinemesostructured TiO2 films and poly(3-octylthiophene) as hole conductor allow reproducible achievementof energy conversion efficiencies of about 0.52%. These values, obtained with thin TiO2 films (250 nm),are very promising.
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