Effect of organic dyes on the performance of ZnO based dye-sensitized solar cells

The present paper reports the synthesis and performance study of ZnO based Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC). ZnO nanorods were fabricated by sol-gel technique using. Three types of DSSCs were fabricated by two different classes of organic dyes using, namely xanthenes, anthocyanins and a mixed-dye with equal proportion mixture of xanthenes and anthocyanins. The absorbance spectra of dyes were compared with performances of the cells. The parasitic resistances of the cells were determined from the I – V characteristics of the cells and various parameters of DSSCs like Ideality factor, Fill factor and Energy conversion efficiency were determined. Among the three kinds of dyes tested, the efficiency of cell with mixed dye was intermediate but its value was found to be higher than the average efficiency of cells with two individual dyes. This is due to the improvement in ideality factor of the cell.