Fabrication, modeling and electrical characterization of natural dye sensitized solar cell under different thermal stress conditions

In this paper, we study Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) using extracted traditional and typical natural dyes. We determine electrical parameters using a normalized hybrid halogen-LED solar simulator system and we reach typical photocurrents density of 0.53 mA/cm(2) under AM1.5. We consider an analytical developed model to determine internal parameters and we obtain a high series resistance in the studied DSSCs. The added high power white LED in the solar simulator improves the sensibility in the UV region of studied DSSCs. We show that DC method used in Incident Photon to Electron Conversion Efficiency (IPCE) measurements is more significant to describe the generation and collection of carriers. The effect of temperature on the electrical parameters was shown and especially in the dye stability who increased the shunt resistances and induced a decay of open circuit voltage. (C) 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.