Efficiency Enhancement of Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) using Copper Nanopowder (CuNW) in TiO2 as Photoanode

The development of renewable energy devices has seen the application of several methods to improve the efficiency of DSSC. One of the methods is to reduce the electron recombination effect from TiO2 to the oxidized dye by introducing copper nanopowder (CuNW) as an electron recombination barrier into the TiO2 layer. The phthaloyl chitosan (PhCh)-based gel polymer electrolytes (GPEs) containing tetrapropylammonium iodide (TPAI) salt, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium iodide (BMII) ionic liquid (IL), 4-tert-butylpyridine (TBP), Guanidinium thiocyanate (GuSCN) as additives and (I-/I-3(-)) redox couple have been used as an ion conducting medium in the DSSCs. The DSSCs were characterized by incident photon-to-current conversion efficiency (IPCE) measurements. The DSSC containing 3 wt% of CuNW showed the highest IPCE of 53.7% at 535 nm. Under the irradiation of 1000 W m(-2) (AM 1.5), 3 wt% of CuNW exhibited the highest cell efficiency, eta of 7.19%, J(sc) = 0.0133 A cm(-2), V-oc = 0.76 V, and FF = 0.71.