Elucidating the opto-electrical properties of solid and hollow titania scattering layers for improvement of dye-sensitized solar cells

The light scattering method has been adapted in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) for optical absorption enhancement. In DSC's, particle-size of TiO2 should be inline with the scattering wavelength range. Scattering particles can be used either by forming a bilayer structure with TiO2 nanocrystalline film or into the bulk of TiO2 nanocrystalline film. For improving the DSCs performances these scattering layers aim to refract/reflect the incident light by extending the traveling distance of UV-Visible/near-IR light within the dye-sensitized TiO2 nanocrystalline film. In this work, the scattering layers with two different particle-sizes (~ 200 nm-solid and ~ 400 nm-hollow) were deposited as an additional layer on the top of dye-sensitized TiO2 nanocrystalline film and the morphological properties were studied. By using various opto-electrical characterization techniques, the influence of these scattering layers for two different classes of DSCs prepared from N3 (UV-Vis) and SQ2 (near-IR) dyes were investigated.