Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2014
In order to make use of the waste heat caused by the unabsorbed light based on photovoltaic(PV) effect, a novel hybrid dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) with the synergies of PV and thermoelectric(TE) effect has been proposed in present work. The main idea is to prepare a composite hybrid DSSC photoanode which can simultaneously achieve PV and TE conversion by incorporating the excellent TE Bi-Te alloys into TiO2 nanomaterial. In this paper, Bi2Te3 nanoplates with different size were doped in the TiO2 nanoparticle photoanode and the effect of the Bi2Te3 size on the properties of DSSCs was analyzed. It is found that with the decrease of the size of the Bi2Te3 nanoplates, the TE performance became better and the dye absorption and the conversion efficiency of DSSCs were improved. Preliminary results show that the efficiency of DSSC with Bi2Te3 increased atleast 15.3% compared to the undoped. By further optimizing the parameters, the performance of DSSC is estimated to have a much more enhancement. Therefore, the way of combination PV and TE provides an alternative way to improve the performance of DSSC.