Synthesis and characterization of electro-spun TiO2 and TiO2-SnO2 composite nano-fibers for application in advance generation solar cells

Abstract

Due to rapid progressive research in the field of nano-technology, nanostructures are attaining tremendous deliberation. Precisely, among these, nano-fibers have accumulated unprecedented attention over the last few years owing to their superior properties such as large surface area to volume ratio. For advance generation solar cells, nano-fibers of metal oxides such as TiO2 have been widely employed as a working anode but due to the disadvantages of recombination of electrons, their coupling with other metal oxides is necessary to render them useful. This work reports the successful fabrication of TiO2, TiO2/SnO2 nano-fibers based film and study of the effect of polymer concentration upon it. The crystal structure of synthesized fibers was investigated using XRD, the morphology and chemical composition was analyzed using SEM and EDX, optical properties and chemical properties were studied using UV-VIS spectrophotometer and FT-IR while the electrical properties were studied using Hall Effect measurement system. It was revealed that the prepared TiO2-SnO2 nano-fibers exhibit enhanced conductivity, larger band-gap with enhanced photo voltaic properties than TiO2 nano-fibers. The prepared TiO2/SnO2 nano-fibers based solar cells provide an improved efficiency of 4.81% as compared to 1.8% efficiency of bare TiO2 nano-fibers.