MICROWAVE ASSISTED SYNTHESIS OF TITANIUM DIOXIDE ELECTRODES FOR USE IN POLYMER DSSC

Abstract: It’s widely known that microwaves can be a useful tool when it comes to heating many different kinds of materials. It’s much less known however that compared to regular convective heating it can exhibit catalytic properties. This project focuses on the difference between microwave heating and normal heating and its future in the field of solar cell manufacturing. The main purpose was to determine whether efficient DSSC could be manufactured by the use of microwaves. Focus was also put on the application for flexible polymers. Polymer sintering requires lower temperatures compared with the normally used substrates and they tend to have lower efficiencies. If the efficiencies can be raised these types of cells can become a cheap viable option by means of the so called roll-to-roll manufacturing. A clear improvement was seen in both efficiency and deviation when sintering by microwave heating compared to that of normal convective heating. Electrodes sintered by microwaves tend to show about double the performance in these cases. Another effect that was examined was the combined heating effect of TiO2 on conductive substrates. The combined heating of FTO and TiO2 can be about 30% higher than the additive heating. This is of course important from the perspective of manufacturing performance. Sintering a pure TiO2 paste by microwaves on a ITO:PEN substrate a DSSC efficiency of 5.5% was achieved which is a reasonably good result when compared with that of other polymer cells. Especially considering that this was a basic test. The electrode was only sintered for 2min and the paste was simple. This demonstrates that roll-to-roll printed DSSC is not a farfetched concept. Following that further work on similar cells are strongly encouraged. Some work was also put into creating solvothermally grown nanosheets combined with nanoparticles to create a hybrid cell in hopes of lowering electric resistivity and subsequently increasing overall solar cell performance. No real conclusions can be drawn in terms of increased performance. However there might be some indications of decreased losses but more time is needed on experimental work. The current results might however still prove valuable information for some readers.