Environmental Engineering Reference
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Low-Cost Pt-Free Counter Electrode
Catalysts in Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells
Mingxing Wu and Tingli Ma
Abstract Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) are potential candidates to silicon
solar cells due to their merits of simple fabrication procedure, low-cost, and good
plasticity. Till date, great advances have been achieved in the design of dyes, redox
couples, and counter electrode (CE) catalysts for DSCs and the highest energy
conversion efficiency is up to 12.3 %. In this part, our attention focuses on CE
catalysts. Besides Pt, carbon materials, conductive polymers, transition metal
compounds (carbides, nitrides, oxides, sulfides, phosphides, selenides), and com-
posite catalysts, denoted as Pt-free catalysts, have been introduced into DSCs as
CE catalysts. In the following sections, we give a summary of Pt-free CE catalysts
and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each variety of Pt-free catalysts.
1 Carbon materials
Carbon materials possess the merits of low-cost, high catalytic activity and electric
conductivity, good thermal stability, and corrosion resistance. These merits make
carbon materials ideal substitutes to the expensive Pt catalyst in many fields. In the
DSCs system, they have been widely used as counter electrode (CE) catalysts.
Takahashi et al. used activated carbon (Ca), a type of amorphous carbon with a
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