Dye Sensitized Solar Cells: A New Prospective to the Solar to Electrical Energy Conversion. Issues to be Solved for Efficient Energy Harvesting.

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are placed in third generation photovoltaics and are proposed as alternatives to conventional solar cells of silicon. DSSCs have numerous advantages over silicon based solar cells such as low materials cost, ease of production, and efficiencies out performing amorphous silicon solar cells. As these cells can be printed on glass, they can uniquely offer a high degree in freedom for the design and the optical appearance of a buildingintegrated module. The cell concept is believed to reduce the production costs and energy payback time significantly compared to standard silicon cells or other thin film cells. Although the efficiency record of single cell is 12% the conversion efficiency on larger areas is still an issue to be solved before this technology will follow the production line. Along with the up-scaling of DSSCs, open circuit voltage and fill factor of DSSCs may rapidly decrease with the increase of shunt current and internal resistance. If the design methods and techniques of these cells are not optimized appropriately, the efficiency of the cell is likely lower than 1% when the size is up to 10cm x 10cm. In this work we present studies on the DSSC efficiency depending on their size. We focus on the efficiency of cells in shape of long strips with varying their length from 1 to 20 cm while their width is always kept constant to 1 cm. Extensive studies on the open circuit voltage -Voc, short circuit current density-Jsc, fill factor -ff and overall efficiency -n% of the cells will be presented.