Studies of high-efficient and low-cost dye-sensitized solar cells

Abstract

Dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is a new type of photoelectric device. To commercialize DSSC successfully, it is necessary to further improve the efficiency of energy conversion and reduce its cost. Nitrogen-doped (N-doped) TiO₂ photoanode, the carbon counter electrode (CE), and a new type of hybrid photoanode were investigated in this study. The conversion efficiency of the DSSC reached by 10.10% as the DSSC was fabricated with the N-doped photoanode, and this efficiency is much higher than that of the undoped-DSSC with 8.90%; as the low-cost carbon was used as CE, the efficiency of the DSSC was 7.50%, it was as samilar as that of Pt CE (7.47%); the hybrid DSSC with multilayer photoanode by the film-transfer technique achieved a panchromatic response and a superposed short circuit current density (J_SC) by using two complementary dyes.

Keywords

high-efficiency / dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) / hybrid / nitrogen-doped (N-doped) TiO₂ / carbon counter electrode (CE)

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50773008), the National High Technology Research and Development Program for Advanced Materials of China (No. 2009AA03Z220).

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg