The Fabrication And Study Of Dye-sensitized Solar Cells Based On TiO₂Nanotube Arrays

As the current hot research field, nanotechnology and nanomaterialhas drawn extensive attentions, the reason is that materials with nanoscale have extraordinary optical, biological, catalytic characteristics, etc.Among the numerous materials with nanostructures, TiO₂has drawnextra attentions because of its properties such as nontoxic, stable, easy tofabricate and high resistance to corrosion, etc. TiO₂nanotube has beenwidely used in science research fields such as photocatalysis and thin filmsolar cell. In the dye sensitized solar cell （DSSC）, TiO₂nanotubes act asthe holder of the dyes and the conductor of the electrons, on one hand theTiO₂nanotubes have to be with high surface-to-volume ratio in order tohold more sensitized dyes which can convert the solar energy intoelectricity, on the other hand the TiO₂nanotubes have to be regular anduniform in order to prevent the unnecessary recombination of theelectron-hole pairs during the transfer process due to the complexity andirregular of the transfer route. So it is of great importance to fabricateTiO₂nanotubes with long range order and regular structure. Of the mainstream, anodization method is a way to fabricate TiO₂nanotubes. We improved the method of anodization, which is the mostcommon method to fabricate TiO₂nanotube array films, and preparedTiO₂nanotube films with better properties. Then we assembled front-sideilluminated dye-sensitized solar cells （DSSCs）,and investigated theirperformances. After measuring the I-V curves, we find that DSSCsassembled with both-end-open membranes have the highest efficiency.The efficiency is3.04%, with the tube length of15μm. The longer thetubes, the higher the efficiency is. In conclusion, this method forassembling DSSCs is simple and efficient.