Recent progress and the status of dye-sensitised solar cell (DSSC) technology with state-of-the-art conversion efficiencies

Abstract

Dye-sensitised solar cell (DSSC) technology has seen some radical advancement recently owing to the new materials and device structure innovations. The efficiency increase in the solid state version of DSSCs from about 5% to over 15% have been reported within two years of time scale, which comes mainly from the efforts in the perovskites based mesoporous solar cells developments. This has increased its potential significantly to become a low cost alternative for commercially available solar cell technologies. The progress of the liquid junction based DSSCs towards their better performance and stability had been relatively slower and was coupled with scale up and engineering challenges such as encapsulation, sealing of the device, etc. The efficiency figures for conventional DSSCs had been staying stagnant for almost two decades although many research groups had been concentrating to improve the efficiency of DSSC through various ways. The recent developments on the solid state DSSCs have given a solid belief for this technology to make a mark towards its commercialisation. Although a great progress in the device efficiency has been made but a lot of efforts are still needed to break the barriers which had been preventing this from penetrating the market. An attempt has been made through this article to report the recent developments in the liquid junction, quasi and solid state versions of the DSSC technology with their state of the art efficiency figures reflecting their current status.