Abstract
There is a great attention towards fulfilling energy requirement via renewable energy sources. Solar energy is one of the uprising renewable energy sources for the planet earth. Dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have been identified as a promising technology to harvest solar energy and to convert that to electricity. In this study, it was attempted to optimize the composition of a gel polymer electrolyte consisting with polyvinylidene fluoride (PVdF), ethylene carbonate (EC), propylene carbonate (PC), tetrahexylammonium iodide (Hex 4 NI) and iodide (I 2 ) to be utilized for DSSC application. The composition was fine tuned to get the highest conductivity by varying the salt concentration. The composition, 100 PVdF / 400 EC / 400 PC / 150 Hex 4 NI / 7.3 I 2 exhibited the highest conductivity of 3.43 x 10 -3 Scm -1 at room temperature. Sample was purely an anionic conductor. DSSCs were fabricated in the configuration, FTO / TiO 2 / Dye / GPE / Pt / FTO. The open circuit voltage and short circuit current density were 799 mV and 1.06 mA respectively. The calculated fill factor was 0.62 and the efficiency was 2.08%.
Highlights
Due to the warning of doubling the energy requirement of the globe within few years and dreadful climatic consequences of the green house effect by fossil fuel combustion, seeking alternative renewable energy sources has become an urgent requirement
After the salt concentration of 150, conductivity decreases. This hints that there should be some competitive factors to govern the variation of conductivity with salt concentration
The system we have reported with polyvinylidene fluoride (PVdF), ethylene carbonate (EC), propylene carbonate (PC) and the salt 1methyl 3propyl Immidazolium Iodide has resulted a Fill factor (FF) of 0.58 which is slightly lower even the conductivity value is higher than the present system[10]
Summary
Due to the warning of doubling the energy requirement of the globe within few years and dreadful climatic consequences of the green house effect by fossil fuel combustion, seeking alternative renewable energy sources has become an urgent requirement. Gratzel in 1991 about dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), an intense interest aroused to develop them all over the world owing to some of their fascinating properties like low cost, simple preparation procedure and benign effect on the environment.[1]. DSSCs are fallen into the third generation of photovoltaic technology. Conventional solar cells are based on crystalline silicon and depend on P-N junction to separate photo generated charge carriers. In DSSCs, light absorption is separated from the charge carrier transport.[2] Even the solar power conversion efficiencies of DSSCs are lower than that of silicon based solar cells, there is a great potential to improve their performance. Since the work of Gratzel, many attempts have been put forward to develop DSSCs but most were consisting with a liquid electrolyte. Due to the lower conductivity of solid electrolytes, attention has been diverted towards polymer electrolytes which are known to be lying in between solid electrolytes and liquid electrolytes
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