Effect of biological template on the performance of SnO2 dye sensitized solar cell

Abstract

This paper reports the role of biological template on the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) fabricated using tinoxide (SnO2) nanoparticles. Herein, onion (Allium cepa) has been employed as the biological template in the synthesis of tin oxide nanoparticles for the first time and is compared with SnO2 prepared without the template. The prepared samples were systematically characterised using the state-of –the art facilities. A sandwich cell was prepared by using the dye soaked SnO2 film acting as the photoanodeand platinum coated on FTO as the counter electrode with I3 ¯ /I ¯ as the electrolyte. Current-voltage (I-V) characteristics have been studied using solar simulator. Performance of DSSC prepared with and without the template is analysed from the measured I-V curves and it is observed that the DSSC prepared using the biotemplate shows better efficiency (9.54%) and fill factor (0.5352).