Dye-sensitized solar cell technology: Recent development and advancement

Abstract

Energy is one of the essential needs for the sustainability of the society. Fast industrialization and growing population of the world have increased the demand for the energy. In the past, fossil fuels have been major sources of the energy and are being burnt for accomplishing the thermal and electrical energy demands of the society. Continuous burning of the fossil fuels has resulted in fast depletion of the fossil fuel resources and an unsustainable situation for the energy sector as well as created severe issue of the climate change. Due to the fast depletion of the fossil fuel and climate change issues, the current electricity generation technologies cannot be utilized in future. Therefore, new technologies which can run on the renewable energy sources are being developed and assessed. Solar photovoltaic is one of the renewable energy based technologies, which are suitable for the sustainability. Conventional silicon-based solar cells are expensive and suffer from the low efficiency, while dye-sensitized solar cell arose recently as a cheaper alternative to the conventional solar cells. However, they also suffer from the low conversion efficiency issue. In recent past, research in DSSC has been expedited to enhance the efficiency and reduce the overall cost of the technology. This chapter has been focused on the basic structure, working principle and the recent advancements in the different components of the DSSC.