Comparative study of TiO 2 films prepared by EPD and sol-gel techniques and their use in DSSCs

In this work, we give a comparative study of titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) films fabricated using the electro-phoretic deposition technique (EPD) and the sol-gel one. The TiO 2 films were elaborated on commercial ITO layers and were used as photo electrodes in dye sensitised solar cells (DSSCs). To fabricate these cells, we used N 3 as the sensitising dye, the electrolyte is a KI/I 2 solution and the counter electrode is a thin aluminium film. The surface of fabricated cells is 2.5 cm 2 . Both scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and XRD characterisations show that the EPD technique leads to the formation of a thick TiO 2 layer, where grains have greater dimensions than the sol-gel one. The transmission spectra measured in the UV-Vis-NIR domain show better values in the case of sol-gel; however, the reflectivity of the film is greater when we use the EPD technique. Measured current–voltage characteristic under AM1.5 illumination of the fabricated DSS cells permits us to conclude that each one of the sol-gel and...