Synthesis of TiO2-rGO Nanocomposite and its Application as Photoanode of Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell (DSSC)

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) are solar cells that has a great potential to be applied as renewable energy conversion. The major advantages of DSSC are the ease of fabrication process and low cost of production. Despite of these advantages, the efficiency of DSSC for converting light into electricity is still low. It is due to charge recombination in DSSC which limits the photoanode performance. Numerous efforts has been carried out to increase the efficiency of DSSC, one of which is by adding reduced graphene oxide (rGO) to titanium oxide (TiO2) to obtain TiO2-rGO nanocomposite. In this study, the synthesis of TiO2-rGO nanocomposites was carried out with concentration of rGO are 0.6, 0.8, and 1.0 wt% to amount of TiO2. We have done some characterizations to confirm the result of synthesized TiO2-rGO. UV-Vis measurement shows the addition of rGO has widened the absorption up to 400 nm. The FT-IR spectrum confirms that the rGO peaks appears at wavelength of 1400, 1600, dan 1700 cm-1 which exhibited the vibration C-O, C=C, and C=O stretching from COOH groups, respectively. The highest efficiency of DSSC with photoanode TiO2-rGO nanocomposite is 0.09% which was obtained from 0.8 wt% of rGO.