Poster: "Strategies for the improvement of dye-sensitized solar cells"

DOOLEY, M.; EDINGTON, DAN; MEDINA, MARTHA L.; PALACIOS, RODRIGO E.; THOMSON, W.; ALLEN, J.; LIN, S.; TAGUCHI, A.; WILLIAMS J.

Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, California, USA.

Conferencia; 10th Western Photosynthesis Conference; 2001

The core of a dye-sensitized solar cell (DYSC) is a thin film of a nanoporous semiconducting material, commonly TiO2. The TiO2 is coated onto an optically transparent electrode. Adsorbing a charge transfer dye, natural or synthetic, can photosensitize the TiO2 electrode. The photosensitized electrode and a counter electrode are placed in contact with one another via a redox electrolyte solution. The absorption of light excites the dye molecules and electrons can be transferred to the semiconductor by a process called injection and current is generated. In this contribution, strategies for the improvement of dye-sensitized solar cells are presented. A porphyrin dyad was used in an attempt to increase the charge separated lifetime and the overall efficiency. To permit the use of pigment-protein complexes, a cysteine residue was introduced into a light-harvesting complex. The improvements investigated were done with the desire of modeling a small-scale electronic device. For this purpose, we designed and built a flexible test circuit. This circuit could be used as a battery charger in which 12 photovoltaic cells can be connected in different combinations of parallel and series. This flexibility also allows for the search for the best configuration to power a given device with specific current and voltage requirements.