Improving the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells with TiO2/graphene/TiO2 sandwich structure

Lung-Chien Chen; Chih-Hung Hsu; Po-Shun Chan; Xiuyu Zhang; Cing-Jhih Huang

doi:10.1186/1556-276X-9-380

Improving the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells with TiO2/graphene/TiO2 sandwich structure

Nanoscale Res Lett. 2014 Aug 3;9(1):380. doi: 10.1186/1556-276X-9-380. eCollection 2014.

Authors

Lung-Chien Chen¹, Chih-Hung Hsu¹, Po-Shun Chan¹, Xiuyu Zhang¹, Cing-Jhih Huang¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Electro-optical Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, 1, 3 Sec., Chung-Hsiao E. Rd., Taipei 106, Taiwan.

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which the TiO2/graphene/TiO2 sandwich structure improves the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) over that of DSSCs with the traditional structure. Studies have demonstrated that the TiO2/graphene/TiO2 sandwich structure effectively enhances the open circuit voltage (V oc), short-circuit current density (J sc), and photoelectrical conversion efficiency (η) of DSSCs. The enhanced performance of DSSCs with the sandwich structure can be attributed to an increase in electron transport efficiency and in the absorption of light in the visible range. The DSSC with the sandwich structure in this study exhibited a V oc of 0.6 V, a high J sc of 11.22 mA cm(-2), a fill factor (FF) of 0.58, and a calculated η of 3.93%, which is 60% higher than that of a DSSC with the traditional structure.

Keywords: Graphene; Sandwich structure; Solar cells; TiO2.