The Preparation of Dye Sensitized Solar Cell (DSSC) from TiO2 and Tamarillo Extract

Energy crisis is what being faced by every country today. Many efforts have been devoted to overcome the problems. One of several offered solutions is to develop solar cells (SCs) since solar energy is abundant and free to use. Especially in a tropical country like Indonesia, solar energy is available a whole year with quite high power 450 mWcm-2. Several types of SCs, especially silicon-based, have been mass-produced and applied in our daily life. Silicon-based SC has high efficiency yet has high price. Dye Sensitized Solar Cell is an inexpensive type of SC. The natural ingredients could be utilized as dyes for DSSC. In this research, tamarillo extract was employed as the dye for TiO2-based DSSC. TiO2 powder was spin-coated on top of Fluorine- Doped Tin Oxide (FTO) conductive glass and calcined at 550 ̊C, 650 ̊C and 750 ̊C each for 60 and 120 min. Scanning ElectronMicroscope (SEM) and X-Ray Diffractometer (XRD) were used to characterize the morphology and structure of the material. Brunauer-Emmet-Teller (BET) analysis was utilized to measure the material active surface area. As the result, the sample calcined at 650 ̊C for 60 minutes showed the highest electrical performance of 542.5 mV and 0.356 mAcm-2 which corresponded to an SC efficiency of 0.043%. This result was supported by the BET analysis showing the sample calcined at 650 ̊C for 60 min had the largest active surface area of 9.3 m2g-1. A large active surface area enabled more dye and electrolyte to be stored inside the material so that photon adsorptions from solar energy became more effective and resulting in higher efficiency. Despite of the small efficiency, this work demonstrated the opportunities of tamarillo and TiO2 to be applied as a DSSC.