Browsing by Author "De Silva, S.N.T."

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    Coconut shell activated charcoal as a counter electrode for a novel dye-sensitized solar cell
    (Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka, 2015) Fernando, C.A.N.; Hemachandra, K.A.S.K.; De Silva, S.N.T.
    Dye sensitization is an attractive technique in fabricating wide band gap semiconductor solar cells (Fernando et al., 2000). p-CuI is an attractive colloidal semiconductor due to its large surface area and which can absorb many number of dye molecules. The band gap of p-CuI was reported as 3.0eV (Hemachandra et al., 2013) but sensitization of suitable dyes on p-CuI semiconductors can enhances the light absorption. Porous carbon materials such as activated carbon have attracted in these recent years because it’s low cost and high availability. Coconut shell activated charcoal serves as a counter electrode (CE) in photo-electrochemical cells (PEC). Another important factor in PEC is CE separate and transfer photogenerated carriers to the external circuit through I /I 3 redox electrolyte. Sandwiched type PEC fabricated with Cu/ p-CuI/ dye/ (I /I3 ) redox solution/ CAC/ ITO according to the figure 1. The dye octadecyl rhodamine-C18 (Rh-C18) and dioctadecyl merocyanine (C18-Mero-C18) monolayers were deposited by the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) technique. A remarkable stability and photocurrent enhancement was observed in the device.