Soft chemistry based sponge-like indium tin oxide (ITO) ---- a prospective component of photoanode for solar cell application

Abstract

Previously we reported the synthesis of novel organic-inorganic composite indium tin oxide (ITO) foam precursor leading to the formation of “sponge-like” ITO by burning away the organics. This newly made sponge-like ITO possesses relatively high electrical conductivity due to phonon confinement with reasonable pore structure and may have potential application as functional materials in semiconducting dye absorbing layer in dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) and also as the receptor of electrons injected from the quantum dots (QDs) of organic--inorganic hybrid QD based solar cell. This report is a short review of “sponge-like” ITO described as a lecture note on its future use as an alternative new prospective material for photoanode of solar cell in the domain of sustainable energy.

Keywords

sponge-like indium tin oxide (ITO) / sol--gel ITO / nanoporous ITO / smoke like ITO film / indium nitrate-PVA foam

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Acknowledgements

Major work has been done at Sol-Gel Division, CSIR-Central Glass & Ceramic Research Institute, 196 Raja S.C. Mullick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata-700 032, India during the tenure at CSIR-CGCRI, Kolkata. One of the authors, N.D., worked under the PhD thesis program at CSIR-CGCRI and presently a Research Associate at National Brain Research Centre, Gurgaon, Haryana-122 051, India. N.D. thanks Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India for providing her SRF fellowship during her dissertation work.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg