Fabrication of Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Based on Embedded Photoelectrodes of TiO2 Nanotube-Nanoparticles Composite

Abstract

We adopted an embedded photoelectrode, which consisted of a composite of TiO2 nanotubes (NTs) and nanoparticles (NPs) in a Ti-foil substrate to improve the cell efficiency of conventional TiO2 NP-based dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) with Ti-foil substrates. The resulting increase in short-circuit current density (Jsc) of the embedded-TiO2-NT-NP DSSCs was a major factor in the ∼30% improvement in cell efficiency compared to that of conventional TiO2-NP DSSCs on Ti foil. In addition to more charge-transport pathways, the embedded-TiO2-NT-NP DSSCs had a larger contact area between the TiO2-NT-NP sidewall and the Ti foil, which reduced the electrical resistance and improved the charge-collection efficiency, resulting in the improvement in Jsc. The embedded-electrode DSSC with 11 μm TiO2-NT and ∼8 μm TiO2-NP layers exhibited the best efficiency of 5.8%, demonstrating that the embedded-electrode approach is an effective fabrication technique to improve the cell efficiency of the flexible DSSCs based on Ti-foil substrates. Copyright © 2016 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved.