Reliability study of dye-sensitized solar cells by means of solar simulator and white LED

In this work, we take into account a LED-based light source as an alternative to AM 1.5 solar simulator to perform the reliability study on dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). We performed accelerated optical stress by means of high power white LED and during stress we performed DC and EIS measurements with both white LED and AM1.5 solar simulator in order to find, if any, differences in kinetics degradation. During stress we also performed characterization measurements using monochromatic LED sources in order to understand if it adds more information about the DSCs degradation mechanism. We found that DC parameters feature different degradation rates depending on characterization source and differences also appear on degradation kinetics shape. The DSC characterization performed with monochromatic light sources show strong differences in degradation rate and in degradation kinetics shape as well depending on wavelength sources. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved