Photo Electro Chemical performance evaluation of some natural dyes used in solar cells, DFT study and TD-DFT

Abstract

Several natural dyes belonging to anthocyanin goups have been studied to evaluate their potential use in the dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). DFT/B3LYP 3-21G, DFT/B3LYP/ 6-31G, DFT/B3LYP/ 6-311G and TD-DFT as computational methods were used to calculate some parameters such as Egap, Voc and global electrophilicity using TiO2 as conduction band. Comparison between the three methods were done using statistical analysis to investigate the dye which is more efficient due to their photoelectrochemical performance, especially those of the Voc and global electrophilicity properties. The obtained results showed that the delphinidin pigment been the best one between the twenty five dyes used in this study.