| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
Today we primarily use fossil fuels and nuclear energy to heat and power our homes as well as fuel our cars. While we heavily rely on these energy resources for meeting our daily needs, they’re indeed limited on the Earth. We’re using them much more rapidly than they are being created. Eventually, they will run out, and because of the safety concerns and waste disposal problems, renewable energy is becoming a more pressing and the clear choice for future consumer and corporate usage. As such, solar technologies have been gaining its popularity in recent years due to the clean and infinite power of the sun.
N3 dye, a dye consists in the dye-sensitized solar cells, was introduced in 1991. Scientists have been trying to discover new functional ligands and central metals to improve the battery efficiency for the past 25 years. In 2010, our lab introduced CBTR, a dye that consist the functional group of carbine and ruthenium as the metal center, outperformed the famous N719 dye in the battery performance. This result obviously intrigued our interest in discovering the potential of using carbine as the functional groups. After conducting a detailed research on past papers, there’s no paper published by any lab on how carbine-ligand can affect the dyes. As such, in this paper, we are going to introduce the synthesis of the NHC carbine-pyridine based ruthenium photosensitizer with different anchoring group, as well as discuss the effect on the device performance. Furthermore, we have designed a series of dyes: CA101, CA102, CA103, and CA104, with the goals to change the numbers and the location of the acceptors on the carbine ligand, and explore the different phases of the functional groups and the acceptors on the influence of the battery. | en_US |