Study and development of materials for applications in hybrid solar cells

This work aims to study and develop materials for applications in third generation solar cells. The synthesized materials are fullerene derivatives, titanium oxide, and hybrid (polymer@oxide) nanoparticles. The fullerene derivatives, n-type polymers, were designed to contain C60 in the main chain. Different products were obtained, varying the comonomer alkyl length using a new polymerization route discovery in this work. The photovoltaic devices were prepared using the bulk heterojunction configuration and the highest efficiency reached was 1.84 %, representing a very promising performance for a novel material. The titanium dioxide nanoparticles were synthesized using microwave assisted hydrothermal technique in different reaction condition, such as pH, temperature and time, in order to obtain well defined nano-sized morphologies, high yields and high surface areas. Also, it was investigated the influence of the Na+ ions on the crystalline growth and morphologies of the oxides, where nanoparticles, needles and nanotube-like structures were obtained. The hybrid nanoparticles were synthesized using the prepared oxides and a P3HT functionalized in order to bond covalently with the oxides. The nanoparticles were optically characterized and concluded to be possible to use for studies of charge transfer in hybrid systems. (AU)