Titanium Dioxide Loaded Reduced Graphene Oxide Nanocomposite Film as Counter Electrodes for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Abstract

The demands on conventional fossil fuels are increasing especially developing countries. The growth of population among countries also put a lot of pressure on coil consumption and resulted effect of greenhouse. These phenomena will dramatically increase the global warming and pollutes the nature of earth. For the worse, it would forming some erratic patterns like flood, draughts, wildfire, and so on. Therefore, renewable solar energy is the key target to reduce the fossil fuel consumption, minimize global warming issues, and involuntary minimizes the erratic weather patterns. Dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSCs) is one of the promising prospects for efficient renewable resources. Most of the researchers were tried to use platinum as counter electrode to perform the photovoltaic studies. However, the platinum material will made higher for the entire fabrication cost. Recently, we demonstrated a counter electrode in DSSCs system using the low-cost titanium dioxide (TiO2) decorated reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanocomposite film. The TiO2-rGO nanocomposite (TiO2-rGO NC) as counter electrode is addressed to minimize electron losses and hence rapid the rate of dye regeneration at ground state. Practically, TiO2-rGO NC synthesized via one-step hydrothermal method. The crystallinity, functional groups, element composition, and morphology of TiO2-rGO NC were comprehensively studied. One-step hydrothermal method revealed that Ti particles (∼60 nm) have capable bonded with rGO thin film, as agreement with XRD and FTIR results. In DSSCs photovoltaic performance, the optimized power conversion energy (PCE) of TiO2-rGO NC as counter electrode achieved a 2.90%, which achieved a desire performance as comparable with rGO and TiO2. In this work, the low-cost TiO2-rGO NC as counter electrode with suppressed recombination in DSSCs is studied.