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Use of Degussa P25 titanium-dioxide nanopowder in dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) photoanode improves efficiency of the DSSC cell. Annealing of titanium dioxide is required for fabrication of crystalline mesoporous thin film photoanode on transparent conducting glass using doctor blade method. Different annealing temperatures provide different structural, morphological, and optical properties of the photoanode, which may influence the efficiency of the cell. In this paper, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), and UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopicanalysis have been carried out to investigate annealing temperature effect on various structural parameters, mole-fraction, phase-content, and optical bandgap of the TiO2 film photoanode. It was observed that depending on annealing temperature, theratio of polymorphs of Degussa P25 changed substantially. For the change in annealing temperature from 350 °C to 600 °C, variations occurred in crystallite size from 11.9 nm to 24.9 nm, strain from 0.006 to 0.014, specific surface area from 62.77 m2·g-1 to 125.74 m2·g-1, morphology index from 0.49 to 0.64, dislocation density from 5 × 1013 line/m2 to 8 × 1015 line/m2, crystallite per unit surface area from 2 × 1013 m-2 to 2.5 × 1014 m-2, and optical bandgap from 2.4 eV to 3.1 eV.

Efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) depends on several interrelated factors such as type and concentration of dye, type and thickness of photoelectrode and counter electrode. Optimized combination of these factors leads to a more efficient cell. This paper presents the effect of these parameters on cell efficiency. TiO 2 nanoporous thin films of different thicknesses (5 µm to 25 µm) were fabricated on indium doped tin oxide (ITO) coated glass by doctor blading method and characterized by inverted microscope, stylus surface profiler and scanning electron microscope (SEM). Natural organic dye of different concentrations, extracted from turmeric, was prepared with ethanol solvent. Different combinations of dye concentrations and film thicknesses along with different types of carbon catalyst have been investigated by I-V characterization. The result shows that the cell made of a counter electrode catalyst material prepared by candle flame carbon combined with about 15 µm thick photoelectrode and 100 mg/mL dye in ethanol solvent, achieves the highest efficiency of 0.45 %, with open circuit voltage of 566 mV and short circuit current density of 1.02 mA/cm 2 .