Effect of Imidazolium Salts on the Performance of Solid-state Dye-sensitized Photovoltaic Cell Using Copper Iodide as a Hole Collector

Abstract

A promising and cheaper alternative to the silicon solar cell, is the dye-sensitized photoelectrochemical cell and a solid-state dye-sensitized cells using p-CuI as the hole-conductor has advantages to conventional wet-type cells for practical use. However, this n-type semiconductor/Dye/p-type semiconductor device has problem of the long-term photostability. In this paper, the results of addition of several l-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium (Im) salts and the effect of their counter anions on the performance of the cell are described. We improved the performance and stability of the solid-state dye-sensitized solar cell using CuI with ImSCN whereas other Im salts showed only slight effect except for ImI.