Catalysis of Recombination and Its Limitation on Open Circuit Voltage for Dye Sensitized Photovoltaic Cells Using Phthalocyanine Dyes

摘要

Decreasing the cost of electricity from sunlight is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. Dye sensitized (DS) solar cells are one of the promising technologies, due in part to the inexpensive materials and processes used in fabrication. The present state-of-the-art DS cells achieve 10% energy efficiency using one of a small group of ruthenium bipyridyl (RuBpy) dyes. The efficiency of DS cells could be improved significantly if dyes with greater red and near-infrared absorption could be used. Many hundreds of dyes have been tested for this purpose, including both metal complex and all organic dyes. Despite this large effort, none of these dyes have surpassed the best RuBpy dyes (e.g., N719) introduced more than a decade ago. It is apparent that there is large need for improved "design rules" to help guide dye synthesis.