Investigation of novel dye anchoring and devices architecture for aiming at dye-sensitized solar cells with high efficiency

摘要: Current world population has reached 7.3 billion. With this huge population, demand of energy is rapidly increased. The standard of living is also growing, which increases demand of energy in near future. Fossil fuels are currently the main resource to provide energy which are not unlimited. Problems on fossil fuels energy are not only lack of resource but also creating the environmental problems. Oil based energy waste such as carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2) block heat in atmosphere and accelerate earth surface temperature to trigger global warming. From this point of view, we need a suitable energy substitute as soon as possible.Dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) using the principle of natural photosynthesis are now currently at the verge of commercialization having similar photoconversion efficiency as compared to amorphous silicon solar cells. DSSCs or well known as Grätzel cells, consist of n-type semiconductor such as titanium dioxide (TiO2), tungsten oxide (WO3), zinc oxide (ZnO) or tin dioxide (SnO2), with the light absorber. The structure is different from all solar cell mentioned above where light is being absorbed by the semiconductor materials itself. Relatively low cost and easy manufacturing process make DSSCs one of candidates for future solar energy resources. DSSCs reached up to 13% of efficiency in recent days. There are several barriers in DSSCs commercialization, for instance, utilization of only visible region of solar spectra, high cost of transparent conductive Oxide (TCO) glass, and so on. Our final goals are to extend the photo sensitivity of DSSCs to far-red and NIR area, to change the structure of …