Solar Energy, Vol.169, 386-391, 2018
Highly efficient carbazole based co-sensitizers carrying electron deficient barbituric acid for NCSU-10 sensitized DSSCs
Herein, we report a comparative study of four interesting metal-free carbazole based organic dyes with different structural configurations, carrying electron deficient barbituric acid (C1-4), as effective co-sensitizers in DSSCs sensitized with NCSU-10 dye. The new entities comprise different structural architectures, viz. D-A (C-1), D-pi-A (C-2), D-D-pi-A (C-3) and D-A-pi-A (C-4) configurations with same accepting/anchoring moiety. They consist of carbazole as donor scaffold linked to barbituric acid as an acceptor/anchoring unit via different pi-spacers. This paper describes the study of all the four co-sensitizers with regard to their structural, photophysical, electrochemical, theoretical and photovoltaic investigations. Also, it includes their structure-performance correlation study in detail. The devices co-sensitized with C1-4 displayed the superior photovoltaic performance when compared to NCSU-10 alone. The results ameliorate the role of efficient co-sensitizers to yield DSSC with improved performance.