| Tin Oxide And Niobium Pentoxide Nanowire Based Dye Sensitized Solar Cells | ||
| Suresh Gubbala1, Vivekanand Kumar1, Uros Cvelbar2 and Mahendra K. Sunkara1, (1)Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Louisville, 106 Ernst Hall, Department of Chemical Engineering,, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, (2)Plasma Laboratory F4, Jozef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, Ljubljana, SI-1000, Slovenia DSSC's based on wide band gap semiconducting oxide nanomaterials have gained increased importance in the last few years due to their high solar to electric conversion efficiencies at low costs. Of these nanomaterials, nanowires show advantages compared to nanoparticles due to their large areas, charge transport ability and unique surfaces. The performance of nanowire based dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC's) was compared with those made with nanoparticles. Two material systems, tin oxide and niobium pentoxide were used for the investigation. Tin oxide nanowires were grown by vapor transport of tin in oxygen and hydrogen atmospheres, whereas niobium pentoxide nanowires were grown by the plasma oxidation of niobium metal foils. The highest efficiencies exhibited by the tin oxide nanowire based solar cells were 1.8% , which increased to 4.1% when they were treated with titania nanoparticles. Niobium pentoxide nanowires showed an efficiency of 0.52%. In both cases, the nanowire based cells performed better than the nanoparticle based cells. Also, the transient photocurrent measurements in both the cases showed a faster electron transport in the nanowire based cells compared to nanoparticle based cells. Authors acknowledge Institute for Advanced Materials at UofL, support from the US Department of Energy through contract DE-FG02-05ER64071 and a grant from Western KY Energy Consortium. Extended Abstract Status: Not Uploaded | ||