Performance of cross-linked polymers based gel electrolyte in the fabrication of quasi-solid state dye-sensitized solar cells

Abstract

Cross-linked polymer (CLP) composed of poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether acrylate and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate has been used in synthesizing gel electrolyte. A set of electrolyte samples was synthesized using gel casting method by varying the weight percentage ratio of cross-linked polymers from 2–14 % in an incremental order (2 %) with respect to poly (ethylene oxide) (PEO) and evaluated its performance by employing in the fabrication of dye-sensitized solar cells. The synthesized polymer was subjected to different analytical techniques such as NMR, TGA, DSC, GPC, and FTIR to confirm the materials. The molecular weight of the CLP has been measured using GPC and the obtained value is found to be 3.655 KDa with polydispersity of 1.94. The CLP-PEO gel electrolyte with 10 % weight ratio has obtained the highest ionic conductivity of 3.07 × 10−6 S/cm−1 at room temperature and best photo-conversion efficiency of 5.1 % was achieved for the same.