A Research Journey to Textile Structured Solar Cells Part 1. Enhanced Power Conversion Efficiency of Dye-sensitized Solar Cells

Abstract

It is already well known that there are numerous environmental and political reasons to move away from fossil fuels and towards alternative energy solutions. Solar energy has been regarded as an ideal alternative energy and has great potential for satisfying future energy demands. In this key-note lecture, it will be presented that the fundamentals of dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC) including history and background, energy harvesting cycle, principles of DSSC, and solar cell operation. The lecture then discusses the next generation technologies to improve the effic-iency of DSSC. Finally, this lecture introduces some research results performed by author with his graduate students. Dye-sensitized Solar Cells(DSSC) are a believable alternative to conventional silicon solar cells because of their ease to fabrication, low-cost compared with other photovoltaics and wide applications. DSSC consist of four parts, the photoanode, sensitized, electrolyte and counter electrode, generating electrons from photons. Many researchers have studied for enhance power conversion efficiency by improve light harvesting efficiency using the different photoanode. For enhancing the power conversion efficiency, herein, we designed a photoande in DSSC using the Titaniananoxide(P25, Degussa) and Titania nanotube(TNT, homemade). TNTs are synthesized by hydrothermal reaction and the properties were investigated by FE-SEM, FE-TEM, TGA, FT-IR, WAXD and BET. As a result, the optimized cells, power conversion efficiency of 8.06% is achieved under simulated AM 1.5 global sunlight (1 Sun, 100mW/cm2). The author and his colleagues believe that this technology and the results will be a concrete fundamental background toward the development of textile structured solar cells (TSSC). - See more at: https://www.newclothmarketonline.com/featured-articles/ta-research-journey-to-textile-structured-solar-cells-part-1-enhanced-power-conversion-efficiency-of-dye-sensitized-solar-cells/#sthash.QkRBAP6g.dpuf