Fruit based Dye Sensitized Solar Cells

Dye Sensitized Solar Cell (DSSC) was first discovered in 1991 by O'regan and Gratzel. This new type of solar cell was reported to have lower production cost with efficiency as high as 12% which is comparable to conventional silicon solar cell. Initially, it uses ruthenium dye as light sensitizer for the operation. However, DSSC with ruthenium dyes are facing environment friendly issues due to the toxic chemicals and costly purification in processing ruthenium dye. Regardless of the poor performance in DSSC, natural dyes which are easy to prepare, cheap and environmental friendly still appear to be an alternative as dye sensitizer. In this study, dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) were fabricated using anthocyanin source dyes extracted from several local fruits. All the extracts absorb a wide range of the visible light and ultraviolet spectrum. Therefore, all of the natural dyes show light absorption properties which is important for a dye sensitizer. A DSSC is comprised of conductive substrate, nanoporous semiconductor TiO2 layer, dye sensitizer, electrolyte with redox couple and a counter electrode with catalyst. In this study, the effect of different light source and different counter electrode are been investigated. However, it is vital to know that further research need to do more on the locally Borneo sourced dyes to evaluate and enhance their performance in Dye Sensitized Solar Cell.