Chemical Capacitance Of Nanostructured Semiconductors: Its Origin And Significance For Heterogeneous Solar Cells

solar cells (DSSC) is interpreted in terms of a chemical capaci-tance, which is found to be a crucial feature for describing the dynamic operation of solar cells based on nanoscaled materials. Interpenetrated networks of nanoscaled materials provide the opportunity to construct efficient solar cells from low purity materials and versatile fabrication processes. Instead on rely-ing on long diffusion length in high purity crystals, the nano-composite solar cells base their ability to convert photon energy to electricity on fast conversion of the photoexcitation to energetic carriers spatially separated in distinct nanoscaled phases, which enables their extraction. In this paper we discuss the general principles of operation of these solar cells. We start from the thermodynamic model of chemical capacitance, and we show its special role in the dynamic model of the solar cell in terms of equivalent circuit