Photovoltaic Performance and Up Scaling of Monolithic Dye-Sensitized Solar Module

Interconnected dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) with monolithic structure offer a promising concept with the benefit of low material cost and ease in fabrication as opposed to the conventional sandwich-type configuration. This work presents fabrication of a monolithic DSSC module with an active area of 10.32 cm ² that contains three individual cells integrated via series connection. The electrical performance of a small area single cell DSSC with monolithic structure was initially compared with similar cell that had sandwich configuration. Then, the individual monolithic cell was enlarged into grid and the electrical performance of the interconnected cells was measured. The up scaling of monolithic cell led to the increase in photo-generated current. After interconnection, the monolithic DSSC module gave an overall photoconversion efficiency of 0.98%, which was unexpectedly higher than the individual cells. The fill factor of the module also remained similar to the fill factor measured on the individual cells. Our results suggest that the up scaling and construction of three-cell monolithic DSSC module has been successfully achieved. This work can be used as an initial step for developing monolithic DSSC module containing multiple cells with even larger area.