Exploring a novel counter electrode material (NiO/Co3O4/CuO anchored on rGO) as an efficient replacement for platinum in dye-sensitized solar cells

摘要

Solar cells are one of the best-suited devices which can deal with drastic energy demands due to advancements in technology. In this work, Pt-free rGO/NiO/Co3O4/CuO (RNCC) was developed to serve as the counter electrode for dye-sensitized solar cells. RNCC was used with a variety of photoanodes (PA), including TiO2, ZnO, and TiO2/ ZnO employing N-719 as the dye matrix and FTO as the substrate. The produced Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) were tested in terms of their functionality, optical properties and photovoltaic performance. The pro-duced DSSC using RNCC as the counter electrode was fabricated 20 times to ensure its reproducibility and was discovered to have a promising photo conversion efficiency (PCE) of 7.33 % which is 90.13 % of Pt counter electrode (8.3 %) used under the identical conditions. Thus, making the RNCC nanocomposite serve as a virtuous alternative to high-cost Pt as CE thereby accelerating cost-efficient in DSSCs in the future.