Long term stability of dye-sensitised solar cells for large area power applications

To be able to commercialize the dye-sesitised solar cell (DSC) technology for large area power applications it needs to be clear what module life-times can be obtained. Therefore, the long term stability of DSC is investigated. Accelerated tests are performed in order to determine the lifetime DSCs. Stability results over 10000 h were obtained with small, individual cells. It is shown that the chemical composition of the cells is very important, even water can be tolerated to some extend. For more sophisticated investigations, DSCs for the stability tests are processed on so-called masterplates : five individual cells on one glass plate. Cells with an efficiency of 5% have been produced. The cell parameters (Isc, Voc, FF, n) varied only by less than 7.5%. Several masterplates with different components were produced and aged. Stability test stands were developed for long term stability testing, allowing 96 masterplates (480 cells) to be aged in parallel. The masterplates are aged under continuous illumination and electrically characterised in-situ. First stability results were obtained with different solvents.