There have been many attempts to increase the overall conversion efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cells using liquid-state electrolytes. However, this type of cells have unsolved critical problems such as leakage and evaporation of volatile organic solvents. Thus the development of more stable solid or quasi-solid state cell is of great importance. In the study reported here, we developed a novel fabrication method of dye sensitized quasi-solid solar cells using solid composite materials of LiSCN and methyl-hexyl-imidazolium iodide (MHImI) as hole transport materials to replace liquid iodide and polyiodide electrolyte which consists of volatile solvents. The device based on 6 µm thick nanocrystalline TiO 2 film absorbed by monolayer of Ru(II) terpyridyl complex photosensitizer (N719 dye), shows excellent incident photon-to-electron conversion efficiency (IPCE, ~ 75%) , large current density (11.6 mA cm -2 ), and high light-to-electric energy conversion efficiency (5.3-6.1%) under the illumination of 100 mW cm -2 (AM 1.5).
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