Preparation of Gel Electrolyte with In-situ Gelation Characteristic and its Application on Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Abstract

In-situ gelation of electrolyte for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) is a process by which the electrolyte can be injected into a DSSC at room temperature at its liquid state while the gelation proceeds gradually inside the cell This process allows an electrolyte to penetrate well into mesoporous matrix of photoelectrodes achieving a good contact with the photoelectrode To achieve such properties a good selection of the materials and regulation of the materials concentration are needed In this work poly(acrylonitrile-co-vinyl acetate) P(AN-VA) with MPN-gBL as co-solvent system; and gelator using Poly(vinylidenefluoride-hexafluoropropylene) P(VdF-HFP) with PPN as pure solvent system are utilized to prepare the electrolyte The effect of the solvents and the concentrations of gelator on the performance of the gel-state DSSCs are studied Where all the solvents system used 0 1M LiI 0 05M I2 0 8M PMII The results show that the gel-state cells prepared using PPN solvent have higher performance (8 38 %) than using MPN-gBL co-solvent system (7 09 %) This resulted was attributed to the lower viscosity of PPN which leads to higher conductivity and better penetration ability of the electrolytes The stability of all cells was evaluated It reveals that the PPN gel electrolyte containing 18 wt% PVDF-HFP and 5 wt% TiO2 filllers had the best stability than the others These cells can maintain efficiency over 90% of its initial value after 1000 hours at room temperature Keywords：in-situ gelation Dye-sensitized solar cell co-solvent

Date of Award	2015 Jan 30
Original language	English
Supervisor	Yuh-Lang Lee (Supervisor)