Specific digital characterization system for dye sensitized solar cells

DSSCs (Dye Sensitized Solar Cells) show a very important value of characteristic capacity modifying their electrical characterization. The existence of a transient current related to this capacity and the scan speed, cause a difficult to fix the real current values under an I-V scan test. Generally, some test instructions must be verified before measures, but it was limited to the manual or semi-automatic systems based on SMU (Source Measurement Unit). This paper deals with a specific system used to characterize the third solar cells generation. The measurement process was set to be suitable with the DSSC, which has a high characteristic capacity value. The developed system was given to limit the related problems with the DSSC I-V characterization. To improve these properties, a completely digitally controlled and low cost system based on an AVR MCU (Micro Controller Unit) was used to manipulate the embedded system that communicates with a supervision GUI (Graphic User Interface). This system can reach a 200μV of voltage scan precision, 0.5μA of practical current measurement. These properties permit to reach the goal of the system that should be suitable with the problem of the large capacity value of the DSSC.