Simplified Electrical Modeling for Dye Sensitized Solar Cells: Influences of the Blocking Layer and Chenodeoxycholic Acid Additive

Abstract Dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have been in the research limelight for some years and plenty of research were devoted to the investigation of material properties for device enhancement. The electrical modeling facilitates the simulation of the device characteristics of the DSSCs. In order to develop highly efficient DSSCs, it is crucial to elucidate the electric mechanism within the cell through the electrical modeling. In this work, we propose a simplified explicit method to estimate the four parameters (photo-generated current (Iph), saturation current (Is), ideality factor (n) and series resistance (Rs)) used in the equivalent circuit by using the single diode model. By using the proposed explicit method, two series of simulated I-V curves (blocking layer and chenodeoxycholic acid additive) were generated from LTspice software by using the experiment data of current-voltage (I-V) measurements reported in our previous research. The simulated I-V curves derived from the software show good fitting to the corresponding experimental I-V curves, which demonstrate that the simplified explicit method reported here can be used to serve as an effective approach to evaluate the electrical properties of the DSSCs.