Recent advances in phenothiazine-based dyes for dye-sensitized solar cells

Dye-sensitized solar cells(DSSCs) have attracted significant attention as alternatives to conventional silicon-based solar cells owing to their low-cost production,facile fabrication,excellent stability and high power conversion efficiency(PCE).The dye molecule is one of the key components in DSSCs since it significant influence on the PCE,charge separation,light-harvesting,as well as the device stability.Among various dyes,easily tunable phenothiazine-based dyes hold a large proportion and achieve impressive photovoltaic performances.This class of dyes not only has superiorly non-planar butterfly structure but also possesses excellent electron donating ability and large π conjugated system.This review summarized recent developments in the phenothiazine dyes,including small molecule phenothiazine dyes,polymer phenothiazine dyes and phenothiazine dyes for co-sensitization,especially focused on the developments and design concepts of small molecule phenothiazine dyes,as well as the correlation between molecular structures and the photovoltaic performances.