Abstract. Dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is a promising candidate for a low cost solar harvesting technology as it promised a low manufacturing cost, ease of fabrication and reasonable conversion efficiency. Basic structure of DSSC consists of photoanode, dye, electrolyte and counter electrode. Photoanode plays an important role for a DSSC as it supports the dye molecules and helps in the electron transfer that will determine the energy conversion efficiency. This paper emphasizes the various improvements that had been done on the TiO2 and ZnO photoanode nanostructures synthesized through thermal method. For overall comparisons, ZnO nanoflowers photoanode had achieved the highest energy conversion efficiency of 4.7% due to its ability of internal light scattering that had increased the electron transportation rate. This has made ZnO as a potential candidate to replace TiO2 as a photoanode material in DSSC.
Ruthenium N719 is a well-known material used as the dye in commercial dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) devices. However, it poses risks to human health and the environment over time. On the other hand, titanium dioxide (TiO2) has low electron mobility and high recombination losses when used as a photoanode in this photovoltaic technology device. In addition, using Ruthenium as the dye material harms the environment and human health. As an alternative sensitizer to compensate Ruthenium on two different photoanodes (TiO2 and ZnO), we constructed DSSC devices in this study using three different natural dyes (blueberry, pomegranate, and black grape). In good agreement with the anthocyanin content in the fruits, black grape, with the highest anthocyanin content (450.3 mg/L) compared to other fruit dyes (blueberry—386.6 mg/L and pomegranate—450.3 mg/L), resulted in the highest energy conversion efficiency (3.63%) for the natural dye-based DSSC. Furthermore, this research proved that the electrical performance of natural dye sensitizer in DSSC applications with a ZnO photoanode is better than using hazardous Ru N719 dye with a TiO2 photoanode owing to the advantage of high electron mobility in ZnO.
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