Synthesis of p-Aminoazobenzene nanosheet via green chemistry and Study on its photovoltaic properties by preparation its solar cell

This work reports synthesis and characterization of poly(p-aminoazobenzene) nanosheet in presence of Ammonium persulfate as oxidant for polymerization and in water and room temperature condition (green chemistry). The synthesized polymer was characterized and its properties such as thermal, photophysical (solar cell), morphology and crystallinity were investigated. This polymer was exhibited good thermal stability with 10% weight loss temperatures (T10%) in the 235 °C in O2 atmosphere. SEM and TEM were indicated the same results and the average size of the shapeless particles was 71 nm and also the two dimensional nanosheet shapes can be observed in some places, which are well observable with ranging in the sheet size from 150 nm to several micrometers. X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurement was conducted to examine the nature of the polymer and the sharp peak at 2=14○ with high intensity and the characteristic amorphous peaks centered at 2=29○ and 44○ were observed. According to this pattern, the synthesized polymer is semi-crystalline in nature. polymer solar cell was prepared by poly(p-aminoazobenzene) on fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) and aluminum electrodes. The photovoltaic cell characteristics, i.e. open circuit voltage (VOC), short circuit current density (ISC), fill factor (FF) were measured under simulated solar irradiation and power conversion efficiency (PCE or η) was found to be 1.44% for FTO/ poly(p-aminoazobenzene) /Al structure[1,2].