Synthesis and study of photovoltaic performance on various photoelectrode materials for DSSCs: Optimization of compact layer on nanometer thickness

摘要

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have gained widespread attention in recent years because of their low production costs, ease of fabrication process and tuneable optical properties, such as colour and transparency. In this work, we explored a strategy wherein nanoparticles of pure TiO_2, TiO_2-SnO_2 nanocomposite, Sn (10%) doped TiO_2 and SnO_2 synthesized by the simple chemical precipitation method were employed as photo-electrodes to enhance the photovoltaic conversion efficiency of solar cells. The nanoparticles were characterized by different characterization techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM with EDX), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high resolution electron microscopy (HR-TEM), UV—Visible absorbance (UV-vis), photoluminescence (PL), thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) and X-ray photo-electron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements. Moreover, we also demonstrated the effect of thin compact layer in DSSCs by architecture with various precursor materials of different concentrations. We found that the optimized compact layer material TDIP (titanium dii-sopropoxide) with a concentration of 0.3 M % is produced the highest efficiency of 2.25% for Sn (10%) doped TiO_2 electron transport material (ETM) and 4.38% was achieved for pure TiO_2 ETM using SnCl_2 compact layer with 0.1 M concentrations.