Effect of TiO₂ Particle Size on the Performance of Flexible Dye Sensitized Solar Cells

Abstract

The size TiO2 nanoparticles was controlled by changing the concentration of titanium tetraisopropanolate (TTIP) and utilized as light scattering particles in the efficient flexible photoelectrodes for flexible dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The flexible photoelectrodes were prepared by TiO2 nanoparticles (-25 nm) paste with different concentrations of ethanolic TTIP solution. The addition of TTIP produced the bigger TiO2 nanoparticles, which significantly enhanced the dye absorption of flexible TiO2 photoelectrode. The fabricated flexible DSSCs showed the reasonable conversion efficiency of 2.50% with short circuit current (J(sc)) of 6.3 mA/cm2, open circuit voltage (V(oc)) of 0.720 V and fill factor (FF) of 0.55. The improvement in photovoltaic performance with 25 wt% TTIP might due to uniform distribution of small TiO2 nanoparticles over the big particles to lead the enhancement in the surface area, resulting in the high dye absorption and light harvesting efficiency.

Engineering flexible dye-sensitized solar cells for portable electronics

“…In preparation of FDSSCs, plentiful metal oxides have been investigated as the photoanode material in the rigid DSSCs, such as TiO2, ZnO, SnO2, Nb2O5, WO3, SrTiO3, In2O3, and Zn2SnO4 [38][39][40][41][42]. However, the major photoanode materials applied in the FDSSCs are limited on TiO2, ZnO, SnO2, Zn2SnO4 [43][44][45][46], plus a few reports on SnO2 and Zn2SnO4.…”