Experimental Investigation of Carbon Nanotubes Counter Electrodes for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Abstract

—Carbon nanotubes (CNT) counter electrodes for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) were prepared by electrophoretic deposition (EPD). It was shown to be a convenient method to fabricate uniform coatings of CNT with desired thickness by changing voltage, electrophoresis time and inter electrode distance. Currently, CNT counter electrodes are lower conversion efficiency than that of Pt counter electrodes, and it needs to improve conversion efficiency as much as possible. We found that when we fabricated CNT counter electrodes at 500°C, both conversion efficiency and surface area obtained the best result. In this study, we examined that when we controlled film thickness by using EPD, how it would affect the conversion efficiency. We fixed DC voltage at 15V and controlled film thickness from 5μm to 20μm. After that, we sintered it at 500°C and measured the conversion efficiency. As experimental results, we achieved the highest efficiency at 10μm and 2.4 % .