An integrative method to prepare low-platinum/fluorine doped tin oxide counter electrode for cost-effective dye-sensitized solar cells

Conventional pyrolytic platinum loaded on commercial F-doped tin oxide (Pt//cFTO) conductive glass as counter electrode (CE) is a crucial component of DSSCs. In this paper, an integrative method was used to prepare platinum loaded on in-house-made iFTO glass (Pt//iFTO) without cFTO glass and the newly synthesized Pt//iFTO electrodes were applied as CEs in the DSCs. Compared with common Pt//cFTO electrode loading amount of Pt of 32.17 mu g cm(-2) which shows an efficiency of 6.70% as a CE in DSSCs, Pt//iFTO electrode loading less amount of Pt of 13.01 mu g cm(-2) still displays a slight higher cell efficiency of 6.77%. The integrative method requires simple equipment, easy operation, and discards the cFTO glass and significantly reduces costs. Meanwhile, Pt catalyst layer and iFTO substrate layer were formed at the same time in this method, saving a lot of thermal energy, which provides a new method for preparing electrodes needed high temperature post-processing. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.