A novel Pt-free counter electrode based on MoSe2 for cost effective dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs): Effect of Ni doping

In this study, we propose a new counter electrode based on the Ni-doped MoSe2 as a viable counter electrode for DSSC applications. We investigate different ratios of Ni dopant inside the MoSe2 lattice. Our results show that the introduction Ni can increase the active surface area and improve the electrocatalytic behavior of the MoSe2 materials. We employed our prepared materials as the counter electrode in DSSCs and show that our optimized case demonstrates an open circuit voltage of 688 mV, a short circuit current density of 16 mA/cm2, a fill factor of 63% resulting an efficiency of 6.94% which is a significant improvement from the 6.68% efficiency of the DSSCs fabricated from the high-cost platinum counter electrode.