Natural dyes (Tithonia diversifolia, Tagetes minuta and Bidens pilosa) sensitized solar cells with reduced graphene based electrodes

Abstract

The search for suitable alternatives to non-renewable polluting energy sources is a continuous and an active undertaking. There is particular focus towards production of low cost, eco-friendly and more efficient dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). Natural dyes DSSCs have the capability of generating green energy at low production cost and hence become a promising class of photovoltaic cells. However, there are inherent problems encountered by the conventional DSSCs including photoanode and cathode related problems such as high cost and electron-hole recombination resulting in a low rate of photoelectric conversion efficiency. In this work, organic dyes from Tithonia diversifolia, Tagetes minuta and Bidens pilosa were used as sensitizers as replacement of synthetic dyes of the conventional DSSCs. The study in addition sought to replace conventional photoanode and cathodes with rGO-TiO2 photo anode and rGO counter electrode. The Tithonia diversifolia has one absorption peak at 665 nm indicating the presence of chlorophyll dye while Tagetes minuta has absorbption peaks at 534 nm suggestive of anthocyanin dye (a flavonoid), 607 nm and 660 nm confirming the presence of chlorophyll a dyes while Bidens pilosa has an absorption peak at 665 nm which again suggests the presence of chlorophyll dye. The tendency of the three natural dyes to absorb in the regions above 650 nm indicates their usefulness for use as dyes for DSSC. The I-V curves of the fabricated natural DSSCs show that when TiO2 is used as the photo anode, Tithonia diversifolia registered a higher efficiency of 0.18 % while Tagetes minuta had the lowest efficiency of 0.08 %. When rGO is incorporated in the TiO2 photo anode, there is an improvement in the solar cell efficiency for all the fabricated DSSCs with Tithonia diversifolia having the highest at 1.56 %. Thus incorporating rGO in the TiO2 photo anode greatly improved the power conversion efficiency of the DSSC. Tithonia diversifolia dye had the highest efficiency which may be attributed to the concentration of the chlorophyll dye.