Abstract:

Human society has been facing a global energy problem and gigantic challenge, due to the continually increasing energy demand to support economic growth, the gradual depletion of fossil fuels, and the greenhouse effect caused by fossil fuel combustion. Promoted development of various renewable energies becomes one of the most common issues and hot topics in the world. Photovoltaic technology is most attractive and has been fastest developing as a green and renewable energy in solar applications. The Sun shines on the Earth, thus providing around 3 × 1024 J of green energy per year, if covering only around 0.1% of the Earth’s surface by means of energy conversion devices with efficiency of about 10% would satisfy the present global energy needs. Nowadays, because of the low cost and friendly environment impact, the third generation of photovoltaic systems, including dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), organic solar cells (OSCs), quantum dots solar cells (QDSCs), and perovskite solar cells (pero-SCs), have been most extensively studied. Remarkable progresses have been achieved with more than 10,000 publications per year in the field in the past years. Obviously, the solar energy will be continually encouraging people to make even greater efforts towards the direction of improving solar energy conversion efficiency and realizing commercialization. Meanwhile, Chinese scientists have made significant contributions to photoelectrochemistry, design of photovoltaic devices, electrode materials, photovoltaic materials, electrolytes, electrode buffer layer materials for organic and perovskite solar cells. Photoelectrochemistry is a cross-branch research field of photochemistry, photophysics and electrochemistry. It plays a core and fundamental role in conversions of photo energy to electricity and photo to chemical energy in the applications of solar energy. Since 70s’ in the last century, photoelectrochemistry had been well developed. It provides fundamental direction to nowadays blooming developments in various new types of solar cells and photoelectrocatalytic hydrogen production as well. However, as the multidisciplinary studies of nanotechnology, materials science and semiconductor physics, many questions remain unsolved and complexity of the new types of solar cells needs to be further addressed. In order to better understand the optoelectronic conversion mechanism for improving photovoltaic performance and promoting application of the new types of solar cells, it is necessary to further develop in-situ and extra-fast spectroscopic analyses, and other state-of-the-art techniques to elucidate the transportation and recombination of photogenerated electrons and relevant interfacial reactions in the cell systems. In this special issue, we collect 9 submissions including review and research articles from some leading research groups in photoelectrochemistry and new types of solar cells in China, to attract more researchers to focus their studies on this blooming field. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the authors, reviewers, and editorial staffs of Journal of Electrochemistry for their excellent and professional contributions to this special issue.