Titania nanostructures are successfully used in hybrid solar cells. Tailoring of the titania nanostructures is achieved by a block copolymer assisted sol-gel synthesis. Different morphologies are installed by the choice of the weight ratios used in the sol-gel synthesis. In particular porous nanostructures are of interest, with pore sizes of several tens of nanometers. Such foam-like titania films have high mechanical stability and provide a percolating network for charge transport. A low-temperature route to directly obtain polymer/titania hybrid films is presented. For this, a custom-made conjugated polymer has been synthesized and used in a sol-gel process together with a low temperature titania precursor. The custom-made polymer was designed to act as the structure-directing agent for titanium dioxide through selective incorporation of the titania precursor and enables the direct fabrication of the hybrid films. As a consequence, backfilling of porous network structures is no longer necessary.

Towards low-temperature synthesis of polymer/titania hybrid films for application in photovoltaics

251st National Meeting (2016)

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