Certain investigations on the synthesis of sno2 nanostructures via biotemplates and their performance on dssc applications

Abstract

The increase in the consumption of global energy and the decrease of newlinefossil fuels motivates the researchers to concentrate on sustainable and newlinerenewable energy resources. Solar energy, which is abundant, clean and newlineenvironmentally friendly, promises to be the alternative resource for this newlineenergy crisis. Among the three generation solar cells, Dye sensitized solar newlinecells (DSSCs) are the promising candidate alternative tothe traditional solidstate newlinesilicon solar cells. Among various metal oxide semiconductors (MOS) newlineTin Oxide (SnO2)is found to be the most appealing stable n-type newlinesemiconductor and hastwo distinct advantages over TiO2 in terms of higher newlineelectronmobilityand wider band gap. The performance of DSSC depends on newlinesize, crystallinity, surface area, morphology and band gap of the photoanode newlinematerial and hence nanostructured metal oxide semiconductors with large newlinesurface area is preferred as a photoanode materials. This in turn increases the newlineadsorption of dye molecules on the semiconducting material which favours newlinehigh conversion efficiency. Hence, the current work focuses on to fabricate newlineenvironmentally friendly dye sensitized solar cells using template assisted newlineSnO2nanostructures as a photoanode and Alizarin as the dye sensitizer to newlineenhance the power conversion efficiency of the DSSC. SnO2 nanostructures newlinewere synthesized using stannous chloride without template and with templates newlineas Parthenium Hysterophorous flower, Onion, Corn Cob at various pH values newline(7, 8, 9 and 10). Characterisation was carried for all the samples using stateof- newlineart facilities. The current density voltage characteristics of the solar cells newlineconstructed using these nanostructures as photoanode and sensitized by newlineAlizarin dye have been studied. newline