Synthesis and characterization of an A2BC type phthalocyanine and its visible-light-responsive photocatalytic H2 production performance on graphitic carbon nitride
Asymmetric ZnPc derivatives with two carboxyl and six diphenylphenoxy or diphenylthiophenol groups were synthesized as dye of DSSCs. Those ZnPcs exhibit strong red/near-IR light absorption, and Zn-tri-PcNc-5 with six diphenylthiophenol groups shows obvious redshift in the Q-band and enhanced absorbance compared to Zn-tri-PcNc-4 with six diphenylphenoxy groups, while Zn-tri-PcNc-4 yielded a 3.22% efficiency in sensitizing TiO2-based solar cell, much higher than that (1.30%) of the S-substituted analog (Zn-tri-PcNc-5). The decreased efficiency of Zn-tri-PcNc-5 is due to the molecular orbital shift to negative direction, stemmed from S atoms instead of O atoms in the six substituents of Zn-tri-PcNc-4, which leads to insufficient driving force for the electron injection. The present results demonstrate that the optimization of molecular orbital levels of ZnPcs via changing the substituents' "push-pull" effect is an effective approach to improve the ZnPc-sensitized cell performance. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Enhancement of Incident Photon-to-Current Conversion Efficiency for Phthalocyanine-Sensitized Solar Cells by 3D Molecular Structuralization
Enlarging the molecular size of zinc phthalocyanine (Pc) dyes three dimensionally with 2,6-diphenylphenoxy substituents significantly reduced the aggregation of the dyes on a TiO(2) surface. As a result, the incident photon-to-current conversion efficiency was improved not only in the Q band but over the whole absorption range, achieving 4.6% energy conversion efficiency under one-sun conditions. Electron Lifetime measurements indicated that these Pc dyes do not enhance charge recombination, encouraging further development of Pc.