Developments in and prospects for photocathodic and tandem dye-sensitized solar cells

Third generation photovoltaics are based on the concept of providing high conversion efficiencies with low device production costs. As such, second generation concepts, such as Dye-sensitized Solar Cells (DSCs), serve as a good starting point for the development of these new devices. Tandem DSC devices are one example of such a concept, and can be constructed using two photoactive electrodes (one photoanode and one photocathode) inside the one cavity, increasing the theoretical efficiency limit by around 50% as compared to the conventional design. As there has been substantial effort devoted to the development of n-type DSCs, the focus of researchers investigating tandem DSCs has been to create high performance p-type systems, which operate by an analogous, but inverted, mechanism to n-type DSCs.