Synthesis of cationic nano-clay for dye-sensitized solar cells

• Main Author: Wu, Peixuan.
• Other Authors: Wong Chee Cheong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/53775
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Hydrothermal synthesis of cationic nan-clay (smectite) was conducted with Sodium Silicate, NaOH, and MgCl2/AlCl3 with varied synthesizing temperature, solution pH and hydrothermal treatment duration. The properties of synthesized cationic nano-clay as well as commercial smectite was examined using FESEM, and XRD. No obvious difference was observe in particle size of samples synthesized under different conditions, while the XRD results have significant variance. Device tests were conducted with prepared cationic nano-clay samples and commercial smectite to support the discussion. The device performance of sample 7 was the best followed by commercial smectite with similar XRD pattern which gelates with electrolyte. This phenomenon may be due to the decrease contact area of electrolyte and TiO2 thin film resulted from big particle size of gelated species. The trend of improved JSC was also observed with cationic nano-clay DSSCs compared with standard liquid cell and anionic nano-clay DSSCs. It was hypothesized the increased JSC was resulted by decrement of ion travelling space caused by repulsion from anionic planars of cationic nano-clay. To prove the hypothesis and study the mechanism, future work is recommended as adopting other kind of electrolytes with different or larger paticle sized redox species. And synthesis of smectite with small particle size which can gelate with electrolyte, followed by device tests is also recommended.