Abstract
Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) are much more eco-friendly, low cost and easy to fabricate devices compared to silicon solar cells. In order to overcome their problems with safety and the long-term stability due to sealing problems, liquid electrolytes employed in these devices are replaced with quasi solid-state or gel electrolytes even though the overall efficiencies are somewhat lower. In this study DSSCs are fabricated and tested by replacing the conventional liquid electrolyte using a quasi–solid state electrolyte comprised of biodegradable electro spun cellulose acetate (CA) nanofibres. DSSCs fabricated with this quasi-solid state electrolytes showed an overall light to electricity conversion efficiency of 4.0% under the illumination of 100 mW cm-2 (AM 1.5). The corresponding values of short circuit current density (Jsc), open circuit voltage (Voc) and the fill factor (FF) of this device were 9.83mA cm-2, 699.1 mV and 0.58 respectively.
Highlights
Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) are a low cost and simple alternative to conventional solar cells and considered as a promising solution for harvesting solar energy (Nazeeruddin et al, 2011)
A typical DSSC isfabricated by sandwiching a semiconductor film associated with a sensitizer and a redox mediator in an electrolyte between twofluorine doped Tin oxide (FTO) conducting electrodes
In DSSC performance, the electrolyte plays a critical role by transferring charged redox species between the photo anode and the counter electrode
Summary
Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) are a low cost and simple alternative to conventional solar cells and considered as a promising solution for harvesting solar energy (Nazeeruddin et al, 2011). Properties such as biodegradability, abundance, thermal stability and chemical resistance of Cellulose Acetate (CA) nanofibres have led to employ them in many biomedical applications, selfcleaning textiles andsmart fabrics, reinforced nano composites, and inareas such as biotechnology, agriculture, environmental engineering, defense and security, energy storage and generation(Chen et al.,2007; Han et al.; 2008, Konwarh et al 2013)). We have tested the performances of DSSCs consisting of quasi solid- state electrolyte with CA and sensitized by a natural dye (Weerasinghe et al, 2016). In this study, we have varied the composition of CA based quasi solid electrolyte and tested its performances in RuN719 dye sensitized DSSCs and promising solar cells performance was obtained. The electrodes were immersed in an ethanolic 0.3mM solution of N719 dye of at room temperature and left for 24 h to complete the dye adsorption
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