Enhancing the efficiency of transparent dye-sensitized solar cells using concentrated light

Prabhakaran Selvaraj,Hasan Baig,Tapas K Mallick,Jonathan Siviter,Andrea Montecucco,Wen Li,Manosh Paul,Tracy Sweet,Min Gao,Andrew R Knox,Senthilarasu Sundaram

doi:10.1016/j.solmat.2017.10.006

Abstract

Transparent dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) can be coupled within a building's architecture to provide daylighting and electrical power simultaneously. In this work, the relationship between the transparency and performance of DSSCs is studied by changing the TiO2 electrode thickness. The 10µm thickness device shows a power conversion efficiency of 5.93% and a Jsc of 12.75mA/cm2 with 37% transparency in the visible range. However, the performance loss in DSSCs during the scale up process is a potential drawback. This can be addressed using an optical concentrator with DSSC to generate more power from small size devices. Here, a compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) is coupled with DSSCs and its performance is compared to a scaled-up device (approx. 4 times). Furthermore, the impact of operating temperature on the performance of the bare and concentrator-coupled devices is discussed in this article. An increase of 67% in power conversion efficiency is observed at 36°C for the concentrator-coupled device under 1000W/m2 illumination. Maximum Jsc of 25.55mA/cm2 is achieved at 40°C for the concentrated coupled device compare with the Jsc of 13.06mA/cm2 for the bare cell at the same temperature.

Highlights

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have gained much attention in recent years [1,2] due to their simple manufacturing process, low cost of materials, light weight, flexibility, good photocurrent conversion efficiency, short energy payback time and tunable optical properties [3,4,5]
It has been found that the photovoltaic performance of the devices increase with the thickness of the mesoporous TiO2, before it starts decreasing for high thickness devices, which is due to long electron diffusion length
The performance of transparent DSSCs coupled with low concentrator photovoltaic system was studied

Summary

Introduction

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have gained much attention in recent years [1,2] due to their simple manufacturing process, low cost of materials, light weight, flexibility, good photocurrent conversion efficiency, short energy payback time and tunable optical properties [3,4,5]. Even though DSSCs have achieved PCEs over 14% [3,6] with small active area, the power output decreases with an increase in the cell active area of the photoanode [7]. This is due to some unfavourable issues such as non-homogeneous and non-uniform titania layers because of large area deposition, dye sensitisation and electrolyte filling issues electrical interconnection of individual cells [8]. Low concentration systems are usually simple in their design, manufacture and operation. Due to its versatility in applications and geometries, a type of low concentrator – the compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) is used in low and medium temperature ranges [13]

Methods

Results

Conclusion