Water Soluble Porphyrin based Solar Cell

Abstract

Porphyrins are organic chromophores with structure very close to naturally occurring pigment in leaves Chlorophyll. In addition, blood cells are red due to iron porphyrins. These versatile porphyrins are simple to synthesize and easy to modify for different applications. By introducing ionic charges they could be made water soluble. Water Soluble Porphyrins (WSP) are known to interact with DNA and their application includes medical and catalysis. Currently harvesting solar energy has become the top priority in research. Different types of porphyrins are also being studied at present as potential sensitizer. Here we report unique way of using 3 different types of WSP for harvesting sunlight. Our simple strategy is to utilize positively charged WSP to decorate negatively charged tin oxide nanoparticles. This kind of anion-cation interaction led to a strong interaction between them. We used UV-visible absorption spectroscopy, Fluorescence spectroscopy, to investigate their strength of interaction. In order, to understand their effectiveness in solar energy harvesting, we conducted photo electrochemical experiment on WSP modified tin oxide electrodes. Our results showed Incident Photon Conversion Efficiency (IPCE) around 91% at 450 nm. In other word, 91 out of 100 photons corresponding to 450 nm light is converted to current.