Improvement of Solar Cell Efficacy by Pulsed External Electric Fields on PSI Protein Arrangement

Abstract

Solar energy is one of the cleanest energies that are abundant among renewable energy sources. To design a very-low-cost solar device, chlorophyll extracted from spinach was employed. Photosystem I (PSI) was extracted by homogenization of spinach leaves and centrifugation and fractionation by column chromatography. The dipole structure of such natural photodiodes is one of the special features of the PSI protein complex that we tried to align using pulsed external electric fields to improve solar cell efficiency. To align PSI dipoles, several approaches have exploited linkers such as amino acids or polymers. Because of the difficulties of nonpolar or polar biomolecules, here, our approach was to apply a uniform pulsed external electric field (PEEF). With respect to other existing methods, our procedure is a simple, low-cost, and efficient design of solar cells, which leads to improved efficiency of biophotovoltaic cells up to a four-fold increase.

Numerical Evaluation of Novel Bio‐Photovoltaic Devices Inspired by Photosynthetic Process and High Poly (3,4‐Ethylenedioxythiophene): Poly (styrenesulfonate) Efficacy as Hole Transport Layer

“…The experimental details were recently published in ACS Applied Energy Materials Journal. [19] In order to the numerical study of the champion cell based on PSI protein complex, it was employed for the SCAPS-1D program to simulate the PSI cell using data reported in the literature tabulated in Table 1. [12,19,65,66] The comparison between the numerical results with mentioned experimental work expressed the exactitude of the simulation findings as shown in Table 2 and Figure 2.…”

“…PSI as novel functional lightabsorbing material with exceptional optoelectrical properties [12][13][14][15][16][17] interacts with light in a wide range of wavelengths to provide a truly green energy generation source. Such a considerable nano-photoelectric machine has been utilized in solid-state biophotovoltaic cells [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] and dye-sensitized photoelectrochemical devices. [28][29][30][31] Incorporation of PSI supercomplexes into solar cells has many desirable advantages, such as internal quantum efficiencies approaching unity, long functional lifetime, naturally abundant and diverse starting materials found in all oxygenic phototrophs, and thermostable T.elongatus, relatively easy extraction and purification, environmentally friendly materials, and nontoxic fabrication methods.…”

“…Our experimental parametric trials showed that PEEF treatment with 1 × 10 5 V m −1 pulse strength during 60 (s) pulse width achieved an improvement up to 4‐fold for energy conversion efficiency compared to that of the untreated cell. [ 19 ] The coupled Ravi et al and our group outlooks [ 6,19 ] demonstrated that the PSI protein complex with an electrical dipole structure serves as a standalone solar‐capacitor. From this perspective, our approach by using PEEF treatment through the ordered arrangement of PSI dipoles in multilayer deposition provides parallel sets of solar capacitors with an enhanced equivalent capacitance.…”

“…The optimal cell reported a 40 A m −2 (4000 μA cm −2 ) output photocurrents. [ 19 ] Despite the steadily significant advances of PSI‐based bio‐photovoltaic devices, their performance remains low, as contrasted to traditional photovoltaic cells. The weak photovoltaic response is a considerable obstacle to the commercializing of PSI bio‐solar cells.…”

“…[28][29][30][31] Incorporation of PSI supercomplexes into solar cells has many desirable advantages, such as internal quantum efficiencies approaching unity, long functional lifetime, naturally abundant and diverse starting materials found in all oxygenic phototrophs, and thermostable T.elongatus, relatively easy extraction and purification, environmentally friendly materials, and nontoxic fabrication methods. [12,18,19] The main challenge of PSI novel bio-photovoltaic devices is their low power conversion efficiency. The first solid-state solar cells containing the monolayer PSIs with 6 nm approximate thicknesses were been fabricated by Gordiichuk et al [14] The devices exhibited the typical absorption features of PSI by a large open-circuit voltage of 0.76 V and a photocurrent action spectrum of 2.9 mA m À2 .…”