The colour of the cell is determined by the dye used. This in turn determines the proportion of light at different wavelengths that the cell absorbs and reflects. In general the more light absorbed, the more efficient the cell and the darker and less colourful it will appear. I suspect the converse is also true.
Thank you for your answer. Is the solar cell you talk about is the dye sensitized solar cells?
and if it not , in case of manufacuring the cell which layer will be the dye.
I don't think it will be a good idea to colour a cell with a dye solely to change its appearance. To change the apparent colour of a cell means changing the spectrum of the light it either reflects or transmits. In both cases you will lose efficiency because you will be deliberately discarding potentially useful energy.
Hi Rasha,
You can make organic photovoltaic cells of different colours quite easily by using different semiconducting polymers/small molecules as your light absorbing material. As Tony mentioned, these may not all give similar solar cell performance due to differences in the amount of light absorbed (as well as how efficiently that is converted to photocurrent, and many other properties that vary from material to material), but if you just want different coloured cells this should not be too difficult. Let me know if you need more info on the materials available.
Thank you Sarah. Yes, please I need more info on these materials if you have any articles or paper includes these data as I saw several OPV with different colors.
Rasha, it isn't that easy to make efficient solar cells from different dyes. You can spend a lot of time trying to make them work if you don't very precisely match the energy bands of the substrate to those of the ligands and the excited state of the dye; the ground state of the dye to the energy bands of the hole conductor; and the chemistry of the entire system so that the dye stays on the substrate. In the early days chlorophyll was tried as a dye but it proved extremely difficult to make it bind firmly to the substrate. The cell remained a lovely green colour - but it just didn't work. But best wishes for your project anyway!
Hi Rasha,
You can check out these companies http://www.solarte.de/en/ and http://www.heliatek.com/en/ to see some examples of the colours that are possible with polymer solar cells. For example, the polymers P3HT and PCDTBT can give nice red colours, whereas the polymers PTB7, PTB7-Th etc can give blue/green colours. The colour of the polymer will depend on what wavelengths are absorbed. But this also affects how much power the solar cell produces (it needs to absorb sunlight to generate power!) so the different polymers will not all have the same performance as I mentioned already (lots of other factors contribute to this too. I'm not clear what exactly you are trying to achieve with your research, but you might want to collaborate with someone who is already making these devices if you are not equipped to do this yourselves, as it is quite complex. Hope that helps.
- Badges
- Science topic