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    Working Principle of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells

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    abebaw matebu
    This document discusses dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), including their components, working principle, and electron transfer dynamics. DSSCs offer potential advantages over traditional solar cells like lower cost and flexibility. While less efficient than silicon cells, DSSCs could be useful for applications requiring thin, lightweight or indoor power generation.

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    Working Principle of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells

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    abebaw matebu
    23 views7 pages
    This document discusses dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), including their components, working principle, and electron transfer dynamics. DSSCs offer potential advantages over traditional solar cells like lower cost and flexibility. While less efficient than silicon cells, DSSCs could be useful for applications requiring thin, lightweight or indoor power generation.

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    As the global population continues to increase, the resulting energy demands have escalated, along with concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. These have greatly motivated researchers worldwide to search for alternative and clean methods of energy production. Among the various renewable energy sources, solar energy offers abundant, silent, and eco-friendly power that has enormous potential for meeting the global energy consumption demands.

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    working principle of dye sensitized solar cells

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    This document discusses dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), including their components, working principle, and electron transfer dynamics. DSSCs offer potential advantages over traditional solar cells like lower cost and flexibility. While less efficient than silicon cells, DSSCs could be useful for applications requiring thin, lightweight or indoor power generation.

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    23 views7 pages

    Working Principle of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells

    Uploaded by

    abebaw matebu
    This document discusses dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), including their components, working principle, and electron transfer dynamics. DSSCs offer potential advantages over traditional solar cells like lower cost and flexibility. While less efficient than silicon cells, DSSCs could be useful for applications requiring thin, lightweight or indoor power generation.

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    1.

    Introduction
    As the global population continues to increase, the resulting energy demands have escalated,
    along with concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. These have greatly
    motivated researchers worldwide to search for alternative and clean methods of energy
    production. Among the various renewable energy sources, solar energy offers abundant, silent
    and eco-friendly power that has enormous potential for meeting the global energy consumption
    demands [1, 2]. Photovoltaics (PV) provide an opportunity to affordably convert this abundant
    and clean energy source into electrical energy.

    Of the PV technologies, crystalline silicon (Si)-based PV systems have dominated the global PV
    market over the past five decades. This is largely because of their beneficial features such as
    efficient electricity generation under full sunlight, good photovoltaic performance stability in all
    climatic conditions, as well as the maturity around their research and development (R&D)
    activities and associated material value chain. Nevertheless, there are several drawbacks
    associated with Si-based PV systems, including their energy intensive production processes, poor
    aesthetics, and low photovoltaic performance in low light intensities. Together these have limited
    their widespread use in building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), portable electronics and indoor
    applications [2–5].

    In contrast to traditional PV technologies, third-generation photovoltaic technologies such as


    dye-sensitized solar cells have been developed using low-cost and abundant materials with facile
    and scalable fabrication methods. Currently, their lower solar-to-electrical energy conversion
    efficiency and photovoltaic performance stability has prevented them from successfully
    competing with the existing commercial PV technologies for bulk electricity generation outdoors
    [6, 7].

    However, their capability to be manufactured as thin and lightweight flexible solar modules [8,
    9] make them ideal for portable electronics [10]. Similarly, their high efficiency under dim light
    which outperforms other existing technologies at typical indoor conditions makes them
    promising for ambient energy harvesting for the wireless sensors used in the internet of things
    devices [5,10–12].
    Over the last 20 years there has been extensive academic and, increasingly, commercial interest
    in this technology. This was initiated by the report by O’Regan and Gratzel in 1991 of an
    efficient photovoltaic device based on a mesoporous, nanocrystalline titania electrode sensitized
    to visible light by the adsorption of a ruthenium bipyridyl dye in the presence of an iodide/iodine
    redox electrolyte [13]. Over this period, there has been great progress in the materials
    composition of such devices not only to enhance device efficiency, but also to improve stability
    and processability and to reduce production costs. These materials advances have been reviewed
    extensively elsewhere [14-20]. In parallel with these materials advances, great progress has been
    made at understanding the science of the processes underlying device performance [21-25].

    2. Device Composition of DSSCs

    DSSC’s basic components involve a sensitizer, working electrode (photoanode), a counter


    electrode (CE), and an electrolyte. Semiconductor nanostructures are used for the development
    of photoanode. Indium tin oxide (ITO) or fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) coated sheets with
    small resistance and with visible-light transmission (400–700 nm) of >80%, allowing electron
    injection and transmission is being used as a transparent conductive oxide (TCO) glass substrate
    sheet [27]. A photoanode separates and transfers the photogenerated electrons in the dye
    sensitizer towards the collecting electrode [28]. To explore materials for efficient photoanodes,
    several metal oxides are used as photoanode like TiO2, SnO2, ZnO2, In2O3, CeO3, and NbO3,
    etc. [29]. An ideal photoanode for DSSCs should meet the requirements of faster electronic
    transport, high specific surface area, and less interfacial electron recombination [30]. Ruthenium-
    bipyridyl based dyes like N719, N3, and black dye-sensitized titanium dioxide (TiO2) nano-
    structured materials have been the most effective photoanode products for many years, and have
    subjugated the immensely efficient DSSCs [31,32]. Platinum (Pt) coated TCO is commonly
    utilized as a CE as it has been the most productive combination for CE. Since, Pt costs too much,
    discovering an alternative cost-effective material is extremely important to substitute the Pt in
    CE. Carbon-based materials like graphene sheets, amorphous carbon, and carbon nanotubes are
    potent substitutes as these materials have favourable properties as Pt-free counter electrodes [33,
    34]. A typical DSSC comprises of a liquid electrolyte having a redox iodide/triiodide mediator
    and a Pt CE [26].
    3. Working principle of DSSC

    The details of the operating principle of the dye-sensitized solar cell are given in Fig.1. The
    photoexcitation of the metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT) of the adsorbed sensitizer (Eq.1)
    leads to injection of electrons into the conduction band of the oxide (Eq.2). The oxidized dye is
    subsequently reduced by electron donation from an electrolyte containing the iodide/triiodide
    redox system (Eq.3). The injected electron flows through the semiconductor network to arrive at
    the back contact and then through the external load to the counter electrode. At the counter
    electrode, reduction of triiodide in turn regenerate iodide (Eq. 4), which completes the circuit
    With a closed external circuit and under illumination, the device then constitutes a photovoltaic
    energy conversion system, which is regenerative and stable. However, there are undesirable
    reactions, which are that the injected electrons may recombine either with oxidized sensitizer
    (Eq.5) or with the oxidized redox couple at the TiO 2 surface (Eq.6), resulting in losses in the cell
    efficiency.

    S (adsorbed on TiO2) + hv → S∗ (adsorbed on TiO2) (1)

    S∗ (adsorbed on TiO2) → S+ (adsorbed on TiO2) + e- (injected) (2)

    S+ (adsorbed on TiO2) + 3/2 I- → S+ (adsorbed on TiO2) + ½ I-3 (3)

    I-3 + 2e- (cathode) → 3I- (cathode) (4)

    S+ (adsorbed onTiO2) + e- (TiO2) → S+ (adsorbed on TiO2) (5)

    I-3 + 2e-(TiO2) → 3I- (anode) (6)

    At the heart of the system is a mesoporous oxide layer composed of nanometer-sizedparticles,


    which have been sintered together to allow electronic conduction to take place. The material of
    choice has been TiO2 (anatase) although alternative wide band gap oxides such as ZnO, SnO 2
    and Nb2O5 have also been investigated [10]. Attached to the surface of the nanocrystalline film is
    a monolayer of a sensitizer. The high surface area of the mesoporous metal oxide film is critical
    to efficient device performance as it allows strong absorption of solar irradiation to be achieved
    by only a monolayer of adsorbed sensitizer [11]. The use of a dye monolayer avoids any
    requirement for excited state (or “exciton”) diffusion to the dye/metal oxide interface. It also
    avoids the acceleration in non-radiative excited state decay to ground state that is often
    associated with thicker molecular films. The use of a mesoporous film results in a dramatic
    enhancement of the interfacial surface area by more than 1000-fold for a 10mm thick film. This
    leads to high visible light absorbance from the monolayer of adsorbed dye [12].

    Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of a dye-sensitized solar cell.

    4. Electron transfer dynamics


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