LAUSR

Abstract Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have gained widespread attention in recent years because of their low production costs, ease of fabrication process and tuneable optical properties, such as colour and transparency. In this work, we explored a strategy wherein nanoparticles of pure TiO 2 , TiO 2 SnO 2 nanocomposite, Sn (10%) doped TiO 2 and SnO 2 synthesized by the simple chemical precipitation method were employed as photoelectrodes to enhance the photovoltaic conversion efficiency of solar cells. The nanoparticles were characterized by different characterization techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM with EDX), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high resolution electron microscopy (HR-TEM), UV–Visible absorbance (UV–vis), photoluminescence (PL), thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements. Moreover, we also demonstrated the effect of thin compact layer in DSSCs by architecture with various precursor materials of different concentrations. We found that the optimized compact layer material TDIP (titanium diisopropoxide) with a concentration of 0.3 M % is produced the highest efficiency of 2.25 % for Sn (10%) doped TiO 2 electron transport material (ETM) and 4.38% was achieved for pure TiO 2 ETM using SnCl 2 compact layer with 0.1 M concentrations.