Investigation of Electrochemically Deposited and Chemically Reduced Platinum Nanostructured Thin Films as Counter Electrodes in Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

In this paper, we demonstrated that platinum (Pt) counter electrodes (CEs) fabricated using electrochemical deposition and chemical reduction can replace conventional high-temperature thermally decomposed Pt electrodes. In this study, Pt electrodes were fabricated using thermal decomposition, electrochemical deposition, and chemical reduction, and the influence of the different Pt counter electrodes on the efficiency of the dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) was analyzed. The properties of the various Pt CEs were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), surface area analysis, X-ray diffraction (XRD), electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and cyclic voltammetry (CV). DSSCs with various Pt CEs were characterized using current density-voltage (J-V), incident photo-current conversion efficiency (IPCE), and EIS measurements. The results show that the power conversion efficiencies of these three types of DSSC devices were between 7.43% and 7.72%. The DSSCs based on the Pt electrode fabricated through electrochemical deposition exhibited the optimal power conversion efficiency. Because the processes of electrochemical deposition and chemical reduction do not require high-temperature sintering, these two methods are suitable for the fabrication of Pt on flexible plastic substrates.