Synthesis and Characterizations of Nanostructured Films for Efficient Solar Energy Conversion

The clean and sustainable supply of global energy is arguably the most important scientific and technical challenge facing humankind in the past decades. Among various solar energy technologies, solar driven water splitting technique stands out as it can directly convert solar energy into the storable and transportable chemical compound. However, present solar water splitting devices could hardly reach high power conversion efficiency and low cost at the same time, which seriously restricts their practical applications. In this thesis, I studied both the low-cost hybrid organic/inorganic perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and the earth abundant materials based photoelectrochemical devices to establish a self-powered solar driven water splitting system. To promote the efficiency of low-cost materials, I systematically tuned the nanostructure to enhance the carrier transport and suppress its recombination. After reporting my works, I summarize the thesis and discuss the outlooks of the future development of this interesting research field.