Characterization of Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell with Different Nanoparticle sizes

摘要

The Dye-sensitized Solar Cell (DSSC) has been regarded as the next-generation solar cell because of its simple and low cost fabrication process. The experiments for optimizing the cell efficiency were carried out in this work include varying the TiO_2 layer thickness on the working electrode and determining the most favorable nanoparticle size in the TiO_2 paste. The TiO_2 electrode or working electrode was fabricated using screen printing technique with the Coatema tool with thicknesses ranging from ～20 to 66 μm. It was observed that both open circuit voltage and short circuit current were found to have measurable dependence on the TiCh layer thickness. The open circuit voltage changed from 0.77 to 0.82 V and correspondingly the short circuit current also varied from ～19 to 23 mA/cm~2 depending on the TiCh layer thickness. Additionally, the cell with 40 μm TiCh thickness showed 9.06% photo conversion efficiency compared to 6.4% and 8.5% efficiency obtained for the cells with 20 μm and 66 μm TiO_2 thicknesses respectively. The second part of the experiment was conducted using three different nanoparticle sizes of 13 nm, 20 nm and 37nm in the TiO_2 layer to identify optimum nanoparticle size by maintaining the TiO_2 film thickness at 40 μm. The cell with 20 nm size nanoparticle, in combination with 40 um TiO_2 thickness showed 11.2% efficiency that is in par or slightly better than the efficiency value reported for the DSSC in the literature as of now. The work described in this paper showed best possible values for the TiCh layer thickness and nanoparticle size in the TiO_2 for obtaining improved cell efficiency of 11.2%.