Virus enabled self-assembly of nanoparticles can be used for the fabrication of photoanodes to improve the efficiency of solar cells. In addition, this technology can be applied to existing dye-sensitized solar cells.
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Applications
Problem Addressed
Current photovoltaic devices have limited power conversion efficiency.The technology presented synthesizes single-walled carbon nanotubes by using a biological template method that does not affect electron transfer between TiO2 and SWCNT. Moreover, this technique takes hydrophobic interactions and pi-pi stacking into consideration when designing biological materials for SWCNT dispersion and stabilization, which was often ignored in previous reports.
Technology
This invention develops a general approach to synthesize SWCNT/TiO2 complex in dye-sensitized solar cells by biological template self-assembly method, using a genetically engineered M13 virus. The nano-composited photoanodes for dye-sensitized solar cells are made by first optimizing the virus-SWCNT template through biomineralization of TiO2, This technology focuses on concentration and controls the binding between charged virus and SWCNTs through surface charge modification of the biological molecules.
Advantages
- The virus binds and stabilizes SWCNTs, hence no chemical modification needs to be done on SWCNTs and the high electron mobility of SWCNTs is preserved
- It is showed that an improvement of power efficiency of solar cells from 8% to 10.3% is possible by incorporating only .2wt% SWCNTs
- Maximizes the impact of sorted SWCNTs
