Towards fabrication of stable dye sensitized solar cells based on acetonitrile as solvent for the redox couple

Abstract

The present paper describes the scheme used to fabricate completely sealed dye sensitized solar cell (DSC) and its stability analysis employing acetonitrile as the solvent for redox couple. Since acetonitrile is extremely volatile a perfect sealing is essential to prevent the leakage of electrolyte. The usual hot melt sealing is employed for edge sealing whereas hole sealing is carried out with tooth pick and a UV curable adhesive. The degradation in efficiency is found to be 20% for low efficiency cells whereas, for high efficiency cells it is found to be 45% after 45 days. The leakage of highly volatile acetonitrile through the edge and hole is mainly responsible for the reduction in the performance of the device. Hence a high temperature sealing method is proposed to fabricate stable cells.© 2014 VBRI press.