Study Of Gel Electrolyte In Dye-sensitized Solar Cells

A kind of polymer gel electrolyte used in dye-sensitized solar cells(DSSC) was prepared in this paper. DSSC composition and preparation technology were explored. This paper also studied the influence on DSSC photoelectric conversion performance for gel electrolytes. Meanwhile we compared gel electrolyte with liquid electrolyte applied in DSSC using different photoelectrodes. The main experimental contents are discussed as follows:1. This paper chose PVDF-HFP(poly(vinylidene fluoride-cohexafluoropropylene)) as high-molecular weight polymer gelator and studied the influence of the electrolyte for DSSC. In order to prepare the best performance of gel electrolyte, we explored the plasticizers, the fillers, co-polymers and the preparation technology of the GPE(gel polymer electrolyte), respectively. The best performance of GPE was prepared by mixing 5%wt PVDF-HFP, 15% propylene carbonateand 2% Ti O2 nanoparticles at heating condition. The ionic conductivity and ionic diffusion coefficient of the gel electrolyte are 9.43 × 10-3 S/cm and 3.43 × 10-6 cm2/S, respectively.2. Different porous TiO2 photoelectrodes were prepared by adding pore-forming materials, which included long-chain surfactants(cetylamine, octadecylamine and P123) and the polystyrene(PS) microspheres. The PS microspheres were synthesized by surfactant-free emulsion polymerization. The gel electrolyte and liquid electrolyte applied in DSSC used different photoelectrodes and tested the performences of the cells. In conclusion, the GPE can obviously improve the short-current density and increase the over-all efficiency by 12% at most, reaching 6.73%. By comparing the matching ability of the photoelectrodes, we found out that the GPE is more suitable for the photoelectrodes with more pores than the liquid electrolyte. Moreover, the sealed gel electrolyte DSSC showed better stability than liquid electrolyte during nearly 600 hours.