A British research team may have made a groundbreaking discovery to improve the efficiency of ruthenium augmented solar cells by treatment with supramolecular dyes.

Findings from the team from Imperial College London suggest that use of supramolecular dyes improved performance of solar cells by up to 25 per cent compared with industry-standard non-supramolecular dyes.

The breakthrough has been achieved through limiting the loss of charge that occurs during the exchange of electrons between the dye sensitised solar cell and the oxidised semiconductor found in solar cells.

Saif Haque of Imperial College told Chemical Technology: "The field of supramolecular chemistry is well advanced but the application of such materials in solar cells to yield high efficiencies is yet to be realised. A key issue holding this back is lack of quantitative structure-function relationships that enable rational design of supramolecular electronic materials."

"A key feature of the work is the achievement of long-lived charge separated states using supramolecular dye structures. Long-lived charge separation is also important for applications such as light driven hydrogen evolution from water, or new optical data storage devices based upon long-lived charge separated states," he added.

Dye-sensitised solar cells, or Graetzel cells as they are sometimes known after their inventor, are thought by many within the field of science to represent the next-generation solar cell but their energy conversion efficiency rate of about ten per cent has thus far proved a stumbling block for the technology.

Source: Super Solar Cells
26/04/07
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemTech/Volume/2007/05/super_solar_cells.asp

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