Enhanced light harvest in dye-sensitized solar cells by nanocrystals-on-microcrystals TiO2 photoanode

In this paper, we discuss the new design of a DSSC using a photoanode by inserting TiO2 particles in size of sub-micron into the photoanode with small nanoparticles. The experimental results point out that the uniform mixing of TiO2 nanoparticles can increase the photocurrent density, and then obviously improve the efficiency of DSSC. The best performance was achieved when the mass ratio of sub-micron particles was 5%, and the power conversion efficiency was 5.58%, which is 20% higher than pure TiO2 nanoparticles. This nanocrystals-on-microcrystals TiO2 photoanode can be used in DSSC with high yield for large-scale production.