Dr. Rony Snyders, Professor, Chimie des Interactions Plasma-Surface (ChIPS), Research Institute for Materials Science and Engineering, Université de Mons (UMONS) & Materia Nova

Title: Towards the utilization of plasma deposited nanostructured TiO₂ films as photoanodes in DSSCs

Abstract: In dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), one of the problem limiting the efficiency of the device is related to the charges transport in the photoanode. In this work, we have utilized reactive magnetron sputtering in glancing angle configuration to synthesize nanostructured TiO2 coatings (NTC) that could overcome this problem. The deposited coatings have been characterized in term of chemistry, surface area and crystalline constitution. Based on this set of data, an optimized coating has been developed and integrated in conventional and solid DSSCs to validate our materials. Our data reveal that we are able to grow NTC presenting surface area even higher than the conventional photoanode and for which we can finely control the phase constitution. It is even possible to generate monocrystalline columnar films. By integrating these coatings into DSSCs, it is shown that a synergy between the monocrystalline columnar films and a TiO2 nanoparticles solution allow to reach efficiencies up to of 6% for non-optimized systems which is a very promising result.

Keywords: Nanostructured TiO₂ coatings, reactive magnetron sputtering, GLAD, DSSCs