Dye-sensitized Solar Cells Strike Back to Practically Useful Next Generation Solar Cells
Hwan Kyu Kim a
a Korea University, Korea, Republic of
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
Proceedings of 13th Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV21)
Online, Spain, 2021 May 24th - 28th
Organizers: Marina Freitag, Feng Gao and Sam Stranks
Invited Speaker, Hwan Kyu Kim, presentation 012
Publication date: 11th May 2021

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have been regarded as one of the most prospective solar cells, due to low-cost, flexibility, simple device fabrication and high conversion efficiency, in comparison to the conventional photovoltaic devices. Recently, G2E in Swiss and Exeger in Sweden including Asian companies have demonstrated prototyped components based on DSSC technology employing liquid electrolytes. A state of the art DSSC based on organic sensitizer-, porphyrin-based SCs as well as Ru-complex-based SCs has exceeded the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of over 14.3 %, 13% and 11.9%, respectively. However, the unit costs, long-term device stability and power conversion efficiency must be further improved for real-life applications. In this regard, we demonstrated that D–π–A structured Zn(II)–porphyrin and organic sensitizers for efficient retardation of charge recombination and fast dye regeneration were newly designed and synthesized [1-4]. The device with new porphyrin sensitizer exhibited the higher PCE than those of the devices with SM315 as a world champion dye. To further improve the maximum efficiency of the DSSCs, very recently, the cocktailed co-sensitization of new organic sensitizer with a porphyrin dye showed state-of-the-art PCEs of 14.20% [5]. Also, to improve the long-term device stability, triblock copolymer-based quasi-solid state (QSS) DSSCs with significantly improved long-term device stability exhibited an overall photovoltaic PCE of 10.49%, which is higher than a liquid electrolyte-based DSSC [5]. Also, the best PGE was applied to QSS-DSSCs based on the co-sensitization of organic dye and porphyrin dye. As a result, the PCEs of both polymer gel electrolytes and polymer/TiO2 composite gel electrolytes based QSS-DSSCs were comparable with liquid-state DSSCs. The highest PCE measured for polymer and polymer/TiO2 composite gel electrolytes was 10.97% and 11.05%, respectively [6-7]. These are the highest values reported for QSS-DSSCs. The long-term stability of QSS-DSSCs was better than liquid state DSSCs, retaining > 80% of its initial PCE after 2000 hours of testing at 50°C under 1-sun condition. Furthermore, we have searched low-cost, scalable metal-free counter electrodes (CEs) based on carbon-based nanomaterials with improved fill factor and low-cost for alternative to expensive and noble Pt metal CEs[8-9], those factors of which limit large scale production and thus prohibit the practical application of DSSCs. In this presentation, new strategy on materials paradigm for low-cost, long-term stable, highly efficient dye-sensitized solar cells will be described to give right answers in overcoming the limitation of the existing technology for the practical use.

This work was supported by the Korean government (Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning) through the Mid-career Researcher Program (NRF-2021R1A2C2006328) and “Human Resources Program in Energy Technology” of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP), granted financial resource from the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy, Republic of Korea (KETEP-20204030200070).

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