Manufacturing of dye-sensitized solar cells and charge carrier transport research

Contstantly growing demand for electrical energy, depletion of fossil fuel deposits and greenhouse effect have increased the importance of the search for alternative energy sources and particularly solar energy. Organic and hybrid solar cells such as dye-sensitized solar cells are most promising because of low-cost and simple production technology. Those cells received a lot attention during last decades. The aim of this work was to make a solid state dssc prototypes and by using new measurement technique evaluate the surface recombination rate and determine factors limiting surface recombination rate. In order to determine the recombination rate in a bilayered structure, the extracted charge dependence on the injection current needs to be measured. In the case when linearly increasing voltage pulse is used for charge carriers extrasion large errors could appear. So, for our experiments we used constant voltage instead of triangle pulse. We determined the impact of the porosity of the TiO2 layer, organic dye and TiCl4 treatment on the surface recombination rate. The current-voltage characteristics and the dependence of the extracted charge on the injection current showed large effect of titanium tetrachloride treatment on the solid state dye sensitized solar cell performance