Effect of TiO₂/eggshell composite using sol gel method photoanode for dye-sensitized solar cell applications (DSSC) and comparison using k-nearest neighbors method

This study investigated the impact of TiO₂/eggshell (TE) composite with different ratios via sol gel method and used for the development of photoanodes in DSSC. The impact of eggshell incorporation into TiO₂ on its structural, optical properties, electrochemical properties and photovoltaic performance were investigated. The absorption spectrum revealed a reduction in the energy band gap as eggshell concentration increased, leading to an enhancement in the DSSC properties. Addition of eggshell enhances the electrochemical properties of the photoanodes. The EIS results confirm that eggshell incorporation can lower the charge transfer resistance and enhanced the efficiency to 2.95 % using natural dye sensitizer for TE 3:10. In this research also, integration with machine learning was conducted using k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) to predict the highest efficiency based on various samples at EIS analysis. The k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) algorithm was employed to identify the sample with the highest efficiency, showing that DSSCs with TE 3:10 exhibited the highest efficiency, with a prediction accuracy of 90 %. To validate the kNN results, manual measurements were performed, and the findings presented in Nyquist plots confirmed that kNN predictions are equally reliable as manual measurements for efficiency estimation.