posted on 2005-07-13, 00:00authored byLukas Schmidt-Mende, Jessica E. Kroeze, James R. Durrant, Md. K. Nazeeruddin, Michael Grätzel
We studied the influence of the hydrophobic hydrocarbon chain length of amphiphilic ruthenium dyes on the device performance in solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells. We found that the dyes with longer hydrocarbon chains gave higher efficiency values when used as a sensitizer
in solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells. With increasing chain length, we observed higher currents and open-circuit voltages up to a limiting
chain length. We attribute this improvement to the expected larger distance between TiO2 and the hole conductor, which seems to suppress
recombination effectively.