The enhancement of dye adsorption in dye-sensitized solar module by an electrical adsorption method

• Dye-adsorption process of dye-sensitized solar cell was modified by electric field.
• An electric field raised dye molecular density around TiO2.
• Dye-adsorption speed was accelerated with dense dye molecules.
• The dye-adsorption time was much reduced from 18 to 6 h by electric field.

Dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) has been considered as a strong alternative to conventional photovoltaic devices. The highest efficiency reached over 12%. Therefore, recent DSC researches extended the scope of the investigation such as the scaling-up and commercialization. In this work, the electrical dye-adsorption method was proposed for the faster dye-adsorption. Fast dye-adsorption is considerably effective to enhance the productivity of DSC because adsorption process takes the longest time in the whole process. This work focused on the analysis of electrical adsorption process and its application to a large DSC module as a real power source. The effect of electrical adsorption was confirmed by the change of photocurrent and absorbance of dye-dissolved solution. The proposed process was applied to large DSC modules and performance dependence was investigated according to the adsorption time. After the dye-adsorption for 6 h, an efficiency of a DSC module electrically dye-adsorbed was 51.5% higher than that of a DSC module conventionally dye-adsorbed. As a result, the adsorption time of DSC module was much shortened from 18 to 6 h by the proposed method.