Hello Everyone,
I hope you are all doing good. I am trying to prepare carbon paste for electrode deposition for perovskite solar cells. In literature, it is extensively reported that to get better conductivity for carbon electrodes carbon black and graphite flakes are mixed in 2:3 in a binder-based solvent and ball milled for a prolonged time. However, I do not have this facility in my laboratory. Can anyone please suggest an alternative to the ball milling of the solution in order to get a homogeneous carbon paste?
Thank you!
The use of ball milling process is to make homogeneous high quality single phase samples. The phase formation is the basic requirement, together with homogeneity. The same can be obtained by other techniques. Chemical synthesis is one of the alternative options. You can try sol-gel, pyrophoric, hydrothermal, or other solvent methods. Once the phase is formed, you can do hand grinding for a few minutes to get desired paste using a mortar pestle. Spin-coater is another way you can try. Good luck.
Hello Abdul, electrode "slurries" for Li cells were often prepared with mortar and pestle in the absence of dedicated mixer. If the electrode slurry for perovskite cells are prepared in the same way as slurries for Li-ion cell, you can adopt this too. This process was quite tedious however. I would not recommend using ultrasound since the binder polymer can get destructed with ultrasound, its Mw can get reduced, which can lead to lower viscosity of electrode slurry and worse adhesion and/or binding
properties.
Hope that helps,
Olga
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