Research Of The Pigment From Spines Of Sea Urchin Sensitized Nano-TiO₂ Thin Film Solar Cell With Different Barrier Layer

Dye-sensitized solar cell has been paid extensive attention for its low cost,low pollution and high efficiency.Generally,a typical DSSC device composed of conductive glass,photoanode,dye,electrolyte and photocathode exhibits sandwich structure.Now the metal complexes based on ruthenium such as N3 and N719 are usually used as sensitizer for DSSC.Although this kind of sensitizer shows good stability,the DSSC achieves high efficiency after sensitized by them,their synthesis must use noble metal,which improved the cost.Besides,the purification of this compound is more complex.Compared with the metal organic,pure organic dyes especially natural dyes are abundant in raw materials and have low preparation cost.It provides a new way to reduce the cost of DSSC.In this paper,we use the pigment from spines of sea urchin as the sensitizer for DSSC,the main obtained results are as follows:?1?The natural pigment were extracted from the spines of sea urchin.In order to determine its composition,we employed the high performance liquid chromatography?HPLC?to analyze the pigment.It showed that the major ingredient of the pigment from spines of sea urchin was naphthoquinone.The ultraviolet-visible absorption spectra showed that the absorbance in UV region is higher than that in visible region.The UV-vis absorption spectra of TiO₂ photo anode sensitized by the pigment revealed that the absorbance at 420 nm was preferable.?2?The compact film of TiO₂ was synthesized by sol-gel method and served as barrier layer,and the porous P25 film acted as absorbing layer.After sensitized by the pigment solution with different p H,then we assembled the DSSC to characterize their performance.When the p H of the pigment solution was at 3,the properties of the DSSC was best: the efficiency was 0.28%.Meanwhile,the short-circuit current density was 0.69 m A/cm2,open-circuit voltage was 0.46 V and the fill factor was 0.88.?3?ZnO and Al and/or Sm doped compact films were prepared by sol-gel technique,the films were characterized by XRD,EDS,FTIR,PL,UV-Vis and SEM to analyze theirperformance.Then the films were served as blocking layer.Then the porous P25 film acted as absorbing layer.After sensitized by the neutral pigment solution of spines of sea urchin,then we assembled the DSSC to characterize their performance.When the content of Al was 1%,and the usage of Sm was 3%,the photoluminescence intensity of the compact layer was higher.The DSSC was assembled with the photoanode with this blocking layer.The efficiency of the DSSC achieved 0.33%.Its short-circuit current density and open-circuit voltage were 0.73 m A/cm2 and 0.68 V,respectively.