Fabrication of new developed DSSCs based on TiO2 nanomaterials

Photovoltaic is a rapidly growing renewable energy technology today. The market growth has been between 15% and 20% in the last decade and the production of PV panels has exceeded 280 MW per year. Despite the development of materials and manufacturing methods over decades strongly assisted by the growth of the semiconductor industry, the cost of the solar cells has remained high. Recently, hybrid solar cells (HSCs), which are composed of organic dyes and inorganic nanoparticles have attracted great interest due to their potential application in developing low-cost, large-area, mechanically flexible photovoltaic devices. Before 1990s, the PV field was dominated by inorganic solid-state junction solar cells. Now it is being challenged by the emergence of a new class of low cost hybrid solar cells - dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) which are photo electrochemical cells that use photo-sensitization of wide band gap mesoporous oxide semiconductors. Our approach in this thesis is to improve the efficiency of the DSSCs that based on thin films of TiO2 nanparticles. This will be done by simple doping of the TiO2 nanparticles that allowing a new design of photovoltaic cells