Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Jiang, Lin

Area of Concentration

Chemistry and Environmental Studies

Abstract

Solar energy is one of many forms of renewable energy which seeks to replace the use of harmful fossil fuels for the production of energy by humans worldwide. One of the ways to make this more viable is to decrease the production cost of solar technologies, without also decreasing their efficiency. Natural dyes extracted from plants can be used as sensitizers for dye-sensitized solar cells in order to decrease their production cost compared to the commonly used and most efficient ruthenium-complex sensitizer, N719 dye. However, natural dyes have been held back from wide-scale commercial implementation due to the critical trade-off of their conversion efficiency, which is often less than 1%, compared to N719’s peak efficiency at 11%. Previous studies have shown natural dye efficiency to increase with the introduction of various alteration methods during the extraction process. This research seeks to improve conversion efficiency of natural dyes by combining alterations such as dye combination, solvent optimization, and absorption-desorption. Preliminary tests showed little improvement of UV-Visible absorption by dyes extracted in deionized water at varying pH levels. By combining dyes obtained from Calathea veitchiana (η=0.67%) and Delonix regia (η=0.61%) extracted into the optimized solvent methanol, absorbed onto titanium dioxide nanopowder, desorbed using chloroform and concentrated, the resulting efficiency was η=0.92%. This illustrates the opportunity for improvement of natural dye efficiency by combining alterations, which could prove useful for future implementation of dye-sensitized solar cells.

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