The conversion of sunlight into electricity using solar cells has attracted very much attention during the last decades. Solar energy is clean, abundant and renewable. Solar cells found applications in many different fields such as in calculators, solar lamps and even on spacecraft and satellites. Historically, conventional solar cells were built from inorganic materials. The efficiency of such...

In photovoltaic devices, light harvesting (LH) and carrier collection have opposite relations with the thickness of the photoactive layer, which imposes a fundamental compromise for the power conversion efficiency (PCE). Unbalanced LH at different wavelengths further reduces the achievable PCE. Here, we report a novel approach to broadband balanced LH and panchromatic solar energy conversion us...

We have synthesized a highly efficient organic dye for a dye-sensitized solar cell; the overall solar-to-energy conversion efficiency was 9.1% at AM 1.5 illumination (100 mW cm(-2)): short-circuit current density (J(sc)) = 18.1 mA cm(-2), open circuit photovoltage (V(oc)) = 743 mV and fill factor (ff) = 0.675.

Novel organic dyes based on the phenothiazine (PTZ) chromophore were designed and synthesized for dye-sensitized solar cells, which give solar energy-to-electricity conversion efficiency (eta) of up to 5.5% in comparison with the reference Ru-complex (N3 dye) with an eta value of 6.2% under similar experimental conditions.

Flexible dye-sensitized solar cells are fabricated using vertically aligned ZnO nanowire arrays that are transferred onto ITO-coated poly(ethylene terephthalate) substrates using a simple peel-off process. The solar cells demonstrate an energy conversion efficiency of 0.44% with good bending tolerance. This technique paves a new route for building large-scale cost-effective flexible photovoltai...

A metallic dielectric photonic crystal with solar broadband, omni-directional, and tunable selective absorption with high temperature stable (1000 °C, 24 hrs) properties is fabricated on a 6" silicon wafer. The broadband absorption is due to a high density of optical cavity modes overlapped with an anti-reflection coating. Results allow for large-scale, low cost, and efficient solar-thermal ene...

We report highly efficient organic photosensitizers containing pi-conjugated alkoxy-substituted oligophenylenevinylene linkers with electron donor-acceptor units for dye-sensitized solar cells. TA-DM-CA showed an overall solar-to-energy conversion efficiency of 9.67% at AM 1.5 illumination (100 mW cm(-2)).

Two novel metal-free organic dyes containing thienothiophene and thiophene segments have been synthesized. Nano-crystalline TiO2 dye-sensitized solar cells were fabricated using these dyes as light-harvesting sensitizers, and a high solar energy-to-electricity conversion efficiency of 6.23% was achieved.

We demonstrated an ITO-free, highly transparent organic solar cell with the potential to be integrated into window panes for energy harvesting purposes. A transparent, conductive ZnO/Ag/ZnO multilayer electrode and a Ag:Ca thin film electrode were used in this transparent device as the bottom and top electrode, respectively. To further improve the transmittance of the solar cell, the thickness ...