“Basic idea, advance approach”: Efficiency boost by sensitization of blended dye on chemically deposited ZnO films

• Room temperature chemical synthesis of cactus ZnO film followed by annealing at 200 °C.
• Utilization of colorful metal free dyes having different spectral coverage.
• Inexpensive dyes were successfully implemented toward construction DSSCs.
• Simple idea of mixing the color is demonstrated toward the development of colorful solar cells.
• Efficiency enhancement up to 2.45% with blended dye.

The state of art is shown to develop attractive, low cost, colorful, and device grade dye sensitized solar cells using chemically synthesized ZnO. Metal free organic dyes showing unlike absorption coverage in the visible part of solar spectrum has been used to produce colorful solar cells. By mimicking the basic idea of blending two individual colors of the dyes namely, Coumarin 343 (yellow) and Eosin-Y (red) to get orange color which has been utilized toward advanced colorful approach in order to boost the device performance. Correlation is made between the optical absorption spectra of individual and blended dyes with incident photon to current conversion efficiency (IPCE). The solar cell performance under illumination (100 mW/cm2, AM 1.5G) of individual and blended dyes on ZnO films have been investigated. The obtained efficiency ranges from 0.02 to 1.98% for individual dyes whereas the efficiency boosts up to 2.45% has been observed for blended dye.

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