The growing world’s demand for electricity, confronted with inherent limitations of fossil and nuclear fuels, point at renewable resources to be the only realistic energetic perspective for the society. The dye sensitized solar cell (DSC) is an alternative to Si-based photovoltaics; it is favored by low cost and ease of fabrication. The generic device is a photoelectrochemical DSC with nanocrystalline TiO2 photoanode, electrolyte redox mediator and a cathode. The latter is typically a film of Pt nanoparticles on F-doped SnO2 (Pt-FTO) and the former is the I3-/I- in aprotic electrolyte medium. Recently, the traditional I3~-/I~- mediator was replaced by Co~(3+)/~(2+)-based redox couples with more positive redox potentials. The obvious motivation consists in enhancing the voltage of DSC. This strategy provided DSC with 12.3% efficiency, which is the current world record for solar energy conversion in DSC.
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