The synergetic effect between extracted dyes from stigma and petals of Saffron for sensitizing TiO2 nanoparticles for harvesting the light

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Development of Nanomaterials for Environment research lab, University of Birjand, Birjand, Iran

2 Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Birjand, Birjand, Iran

Abstract

Dye-sensitized solar cells are the third generation of solar cells, which have found increasing use as photovoltaic cells. One of the disadvantages of these cells is the high cost and toxicity of the synthetic dyes used as sensitizers. The natural dyes were extracted from both stigma and petals of saffron and used as a photosensitizer. Spectroscopic studies showed that the adsorption of the extracted stigma and petal dyes reduces the band gap of anatase to 2.4 and 1.8 eV, respectively. It was found that for a cell which has been sensitized by a mixture of both extracted dyes, an energy conversion efficiency (η) of 0.51% was obtained, which was around 46% higher than that achieved by the linear superposition of the cells sensitized by individual extracted stigma (0.22%) and petals (0.13%) dyes. This indicates that the mixed dyes co-sensitization involves a synergistic effect in the energy transfer of the dye-sensitized mesoporous TiO2 solar cells. Also, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy studies showed that the excited electron of the mixture of extracted dyes from both stigma and petals of saffron has a longer lifetime compared to extracted dyes from stigma and petals, individually.

Keywords

Journal of Saffron Research

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 17 October 2025

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