A study on the optimum structure of dye-sensitized solar cell for expanding the active area

A lot of researches about dye-sensitized solar cell are recently being conducted. Because DSC has several advantages over the limits of silicon solar cells such as a low manufacturing expense, a simple manufacturing process and its transparency. But most researches on DSC are still conducted about the unit cell and laboratory-centered. That is, present researches on DSC are not practical. Therefore, researches on large scale cells and modules are the prerequisites for DSC to have the practical applications. Characteristics of large scale DSC are so different from those of small area DSC in aspect of fill factor and efficiency. In this study, we made an experiment to find a suitable size of DSC that has the most effective power according to the variation of active area. The experiment was conducted in detail about the optimum ratio of length to width to find the active area which has the best output by comparing with the ratio of active area to non-active area. As a result, we achieved the optimum ratio of length to width as 4:1.5 and active area of 8cm² as the optimum size for up-scaling DSC. And we got open circuit voltage of 0.8V, short circuit current of 51.7mA and efficiency of 2.9% from the optimum size DSC.