Extraction of Anthocyanin Pigments From Malabar Spinach Fruits as a Potential Photosensitizer for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell

Abstract

The implementation of synthetic dyes gives a better efficiency with higher durability; however, the production process of synthesizing these dyes is more complex, expensive, and involves the use of toxic materials. For these reasons, the production of such dyes can pose harm not only to humans but also to the environment. An alternative for the synthetic dyes is the natural dyes or pigment extracted from plants such as anthocyanin, carotenoid, chlorophyll and many others. These natural dyes are easily extracted from various parts of plants, such as from the fruits, flowers, leaves, and seeds. Regardless of the limited performance of natural dyes, the natural dyes exhibit advantages, including high absorption coefficients, highlight-harvesting efficiency, inexpensive, ecologically friendly, non-toxic, and are easily extractable. Moreover, this research paper is mainly focused on about extraction of anthocyanin dye pigments from Malabar spinach fruits for Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC). The experiment was conducted using three different methods; extraction of anthocyanin pigments from Malabar spinach fruits: a.) using pure methanol solvent, b.) using 50% methanol solvent, and c.) using 50% methanol & 1% HCl solvent, and the resulted data were 160.81 mg/L, 64.62 mg/L and 77.65 mg/L respectively. It can be concluded that the extraction of anthocyanin pigments from Malabar spinach fruits using pure methanol solvent has the highest amount of extracted anthocyanin pigment, which is 160.81 mg/L.

Low-Cost Solar Energy Harvesting: A Study on Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Using Inthanin Leaf Extract as a Natural Photosensitizer

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“…The electrolyte preparation method used in this study was adopted from [16,17]. To prepare the electrolyte, 1 gram of iodine was combined with 5 g of potassium iodide and stirred until the iodine was fully dissolved.…”

A comprehensive review of the evolution of dye-sensitized solar cells from ruthenium dyes to organic pigments with the influence of graphene nanoribbons

“…Principle of Operation: DSSCs operate on a principle analogous to photosynthesis. In plants, chlorophyll absorbs sunlight and initiates a chain of reactions, producing energy-rich compounds (Mejica et al, 2020). In DSSCs, the dye molecule plays a similar role to chlorophyll.…”