Long-Term Stability of Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Assembled with Cobalt Polymer Gel Electrolyte

Abstract

The long-term stability of a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is a key issue for upscaling and commercialization of this technology. It is well-known that gel electrolytes can improve the long-term stability and allow easy DSSC manufacturing. However, there is limited knowledge on the long-term stability of cobalt-based gel electrolytes and also how this stability is affected when applying different dye sensitizers. Moreover, long-term stability studies have been done with no, or an imperfect, sealing. In this work we investigated the performance and the stability of cobalt-based polymer gel electrolytes using devices properly sealed. Here, two different dyes, an organic and a ruthenium dye, were selected to investigate the device's performance. The cobalt liquid electrolyte was gelled with a PEO-based terpolymer (PEO-EM-AGE) and compared to its liquid counterpart. After 1000 h, the efficiencies of the liquid-and gel-based solar cells with the ruthenium dye were statistically similar to each other. On the other hand, the DSSCs using the organic dye performed similarly by statistical analysis only up to 500 h. Our findings suggest that the choice of the dye has an important impact on the long-term stability of DSSCs and must be considered a key factor in the degradation mechanism.

Long-Term Stability Improvement of Non-Toxic Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells via Poly(ethylene oxide) Gel Electrolytes for Future Textile-Based Solar Cells

“…Usually, especially without additional pressure on the electrodes, it takes some time until the infiltration of the electrolyte through the pores of the TiO 2 layer is completed, which is why an increase in efficiency is often observed in the first days (cf. samples 3 and 5 in Figure 4 as well as samples 6 and 8 in Figure 5 ) [ 21 , 28 , 29 , 47 ]. Apparently, this time span is increased regarding sample 9 due to the more extensive, previous drying and resulting higher viscosity, which hinders and delays the diffusion into the TiO 2 pores.…”

Photoinduced Polyacrylate Based Polymer Electrolyte for Quasi-solid State Dye Sensitized Solar Cell Application

“…Alternative approaches to replace liquid electrolyte are investigated, i. e. polymer electrolytes, ionic liquid electrolyte, solid-state ionic conductor etc. with [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] comparable conductive properties. A variety of polymers such as poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO), poly(vinylidene fluoride-hexafluoropropylene) (PVDF-HFP), poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC), poly(acrylonitrile) (PAN) and so on, have been applied [16][17][18][19][20] as polymer electrolytes in DSSCs .…”

Progress on Electrolytes Development in Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

“…However, solid polymer electrolytes usually present low ionic conductivities, in the order of 10 −8 –10 −5 S cm −1 and poor contact between the electrodes, limiting cell performance [203,229]. For this reason, PEO-based polymers have mostly been used as gel electrolytes in DSSCs, usually with I − /I 3 − redox mediators, or more recently with cobalt-based redox mediators [230,231,232,233].…”