Novel organic dyes for dye sensitized solar cells.

Abstract

Interest in dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) has increased in the last 26 years because of their application in solar energy conversion. This photovoltaic device has attracted the attention of many researchers because of its relatively good efficiency, its eco-friendliness, and its low cost of fabrication. Many attempts were made to synthesize organic dyes as sensitizers in a DSSC instead of metal-based ones because of their high molar extinction coefficients that become important in cobalt-based DSSCs. Hence, we plan to synthesize organic dyes having the form donor- π -acceptor-π with either a terminal pyridine or carboxylic acid anchoring group, Scheme 1. The pyridyl-based dyes will be studied as co-adsorbents with commercially available carboxylic acid-based dyes and the effect of co-sensitization on the DSSCs’ efficiencies. The usage of the proposed electron-acceptor units have never been studied in any organic sensitizer in DSSCs, and therefore the carboxylic and the pyridyl based dyes with these novel electron accepting units will be incorporated, one at a time, in a fully assembled DSSC, and the efficiencies of these cells will be measured and analyzed.