Implication of color of sensitizing dyes on transparency and efficiency of transparent dye-sensitized solar cells

Abstract

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are one of the potential candidates for the fabrication of colourful and see-through solar cells for energy harvesting esthetic windows. However, a trade-off between transparency and power conversion efficiency (PCE) has to be tackled amicably to realize the solar cells with good PCE and transparency. Judicious selection of dyes to bypass the light absorption in the high eye-sensitivity region (500–600 nm) is one of the plausible solutions. This was demonstrated utilizing yellow (D-131) and red (N-719) commercial dyes along with newly developed blue (SQ-138) and green coloured (SQ-140) dyes with intense and sharp light absorption mainly in the far-red to near-infrared (NIR) wavelength region. Transparent DSSCs fabricated using the most commonly used red-coloured dye N-719 although exhibited an increase in the PCE from 2.9% to 5.3% upon increasing the thickness of the transparent TiO2 layer from 4 μm to 10 μm but resulted in a serious loss in the average visible transparency (AVT) from 58.6% to 7.3% making the DSSC non-transparent. Contrary to this, under similar thickness variations, dyes D-131, SQ-138 and SQ-140 exhibiting very high AVT of >70% maintained the AVT > 40%, which is necessary for good visual perception.