Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCS): The History and a new optical activity-based method to predict the power conversion efficiency

Abstract

Improvement on the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) has been a major research topic for the past thirty years. Several research efforts on increasing the efficiency of DSSC have mainly focused on the synthesis of novel sensitizers, with the continuous employment of the traditional mesoporous TiO films as 2 - - semiconductor, and the iodide/triiodide (I /I ) electrolyte as redox couple. Since not so much have been done in 3 - - exploring other mesoporous semiconductors and redox electrolytes beyond these two, TiO and I /I couple, 2 3 this paper concisely chronicles the power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of DSSCs of different dye sensitizers, where only TiO nanofilm and iodide/triiodide redox couple have been used as the semiconductor and 2 electrolyte systems respectively. This list was used to obtain possible relationship between the optical properties of dyes and the PCE of the DSSC. Dye sensitizers with PCE values > 1.00% were employed. The spectral properties of each of the selected sensitizers were used to obtain their spectrum power, I(l). An increase in PCE value as I(l) increases was observed for 81.25% of the sixteen sensitizers considered, which suggests that a direct correlation could exist between the I(l) of a sensitizer and the PCE of the DSSC of that sensitizer.