Development of Perovskite and Dye Sensitized Solar Cells using Nano-engineered Pure, Doped and Composite Semiconducting Materials Synthesized by Pulsed Laser Ablation for Enhanced Efficiency

Energy is the golden thread that connects economic growth, increase social equity, and an environment that allows the world to thrive and the countries to develop. Development is not possible without energy, and sustainable development is not possible without sustainable energy. Efforts have been made to achieve clean and environmental friendly energy. The use of renewable energy has now been in high focus worldwide as it is readily available and inextinguishable. Renewable energy include solar energy, wind energy, geothermal etc but solar energy has been the most prominent because it is uninterrupted as compared to other non renewable sources. Most renewable energy comes either directly or indirectly from the sun. Sunlight (solar energy) can be applied for several applications and can be used directly for heating and lighting homes and other buildings, generation of electricity, water heating and a variety of commercial and industrial uses. The solar energy has been used for several applications which include mainly the generation of electricity. Photovoltaic technology is the conversion of solar energy to electrical energy, where the absorption of photons results in the generation of the charge carriers (electron hole pair) and subsequent separation of charge carriers take place in the semiconducting material. So the semiconducting layer is the most important component of solar cells and numbers of semiconducting materials have been tried for the solar cells each with certain advantages and disadvantages. Several forms of photovoltaic exist today but the simplest and recent photovoltaic is the organic solar cell called dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC). Dye sensitized solar cells work on the principle of photosynthesis, like green plant and algae is used as molecular absorbers, here the dye is used to harvest sunlight and to generate electric charges. Dye-sensitized solar cells have many advantages over their silicon-based counterparts. They offer transparency, low cost, and high power conversion efficiencies. However, until now their overall efficiency has been lower than silicon-based solar cells, mostly because of the inherent voltage loss during the regeneration of the sensitizing dye. Several research work have been carried out to overcome the inherent limitations of the DSSC and to improve the quality of the semiconducting material in the context of photovoltaic activity. Recently, organometal halide Perovskites have emerged as a promising material for high-efficiency nanostructured devices. A new solar cell is developed and consists of a thin perovskite film, the materials belongs to perovskite family has the general form ABX3 (A = CH3NH3+; B = Pb2+; and X= Cl, I, and /or Br). In this type of perovskite, the diffusion length was found to be in the range of 100 nm and 1 m. The hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite solar cells can be fabricated easily and at very low cost. These devices required similar processes to those used in the printing industry. A simple planar heterojunction sandwiched between two electrodes reported efficiency over 15%. Lead halide perovskite solar cells approached power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 20.1% after only 5 years of strenuous development, a great success that took decades of effort for conventional materials. In this project an excellent attempt will be made to synthesize suitable semiconducting materials (pure, doped and composite metal oxides) for enhanced photovoltaic activity. These materials are expected to absorb in the visible region of the spectrum which will be beneficial to harvest full solar spectrum. Efforts will be made to eliminate the inherent limiting factors of the dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite solar cells which will help in the removal of the obstacle needed for commercialization of this technology.