Studies of high-efficient and low-cost dye-sensitized solar cells

Dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is a new type of photoelectric device. To commercialize DSSC successfully, it is necessary to further improve the efficiency of energy conversion and reduce its cost. Nitrogen-doped (N-doped) TiO2 photoanode, the carbon counter electrode (CE), and a new type of hybrid photoanode were investigated in this study. The conversion efficiency of the DSSC reached by 10.10% as the DSSC was fabricated with the N-doped photoanode, and this efficiency is much higher than that of the undoped-DSSC with 8.90%; as the low-cost carbon was used as CE, the efficiency of the DSSC was 7.50%, it was as samilar as that of Pt CE (7.47%); the hybrid DSSC with multilayer photoanode by the film-transfer technique achieved a panchromatic response and a superposed short circuit current density (Jsc) by using two complementary dyes.