Tag Archives: Yun Hang Hu

Another day, another solar cell improvement: replacing platinum with 3D graphene

On the plus side, this may replace platinum but it does seem to be one of a plethora of solar cell improvements that don’t make much difference in the current marketplace as this and other improvements are still at the laboratory stage.  Still, it’s encouraging to remember that scientific and technical progress in an area can be agonizingly slow in the early stages only to gain speed at an exponential rate in later stages of development. Fingers crossed this is the case with solar cells.

From the Aug. 20, 2013 Michigan Technological University news release by Marcia Goodrich (also on EurekAlert),

One of the most promising types of solar cells has a few drawbacks. …

Dye-sensitized solar cells are thin, flexible, easy to make and very good at turning sunshine into electricity. However, a key ingredient is one of the most expensive metals on the planet: platinum. While only small amounts are needed, at $1,500 an ounce, the cost of the silvery metal is still significant.

Yun Hang Hu, the Charles and Caroll McArthur Professor of Materials Science and Engineering [Michigan Technological University], has developed a new, inexpensive material that could replace the platinum in solar cells without degrading their efficiency: 3D graphene.

Regular graphene is a famously two-dimensional form of carbon just a molecule or so thick. Hu and his team invented a novel approach to synthesize a unique 3D version with a honeycomb-like structure. To do so, they combined lithium oxide with carbon monoxide in a chemical reaction that forms lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) and the honeycomb graphene. The Li2CO3 helps shape the graphene sheets and isolates them from each other, preventing the formation of garden-variety graphite.  Furthermore, the Li2CO3 particles can be easily removed from 3D honeycomb-structured graphene by an acid.

The researchers determined that the 3D honeycomb graphene had excellent conductivity and high catalytic activity, raising the possibility that it could be used for energy storage and conversion. So they replaced the platinum counter electrode in a dye-sensitized solar cell with one made of the 3D honeycomb graphene. Then they put the solar cell in the sunshine and measured its output.

The cell with the 3D graphene counter electrode converted 7.8 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity, nearly as much as the conventional solar cell using costly platinum (8 percent).

Synthesizing the 3D honeycomb graphene is neither expensive nor difficult, said Hu, and making it into a counter electrode posed no special challenges.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the research paper,

3D Honeycomb-Like Structured Graphene and Its High Efficiency as a Counter-Electrode Catalyst for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells by Yun Hang Hu, Hui Wang, Franklin Tao, Dario J. Stacchiola, and Kai Sun. Angewandte Chemie, International Edition, Article first published online: 29 JUL 2013 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201303497

The article is behind a paywall.