Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Based on Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines Dyes: A Review

The world has recently been waking up to urgent need to move away from fossil fuels and towards a low carbon economy. To achieve this we need a technology for producing electricity that is efficient, widely applicable and cheap. At a same time there has recently been an appreciation of tremendous scope for making entirely new types of devices for the converting solar energy into electricity. Emerging alternative technologies such as organic photovoltaics (OPVs) and dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have recently gain much attention as well as maturity and on the step of being commercialized. Tremendous research efforts have been invested to improve the power conversion efficiency of the DSSCs, which is generally determined by light harvesting efficiency, electron injection efficiency and charge collection efficiency. Porphyrins and phthalocyanine are perfectly suited for the DSSCs, as photoactive materials. These materials exhibit very attractive physical properties, particularly very high extinction coefficients in the visible and near infrared regions, where the maximum solar photon flux occurs, that is necessary for efficient light harvesting efficiency, besides suitable highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) energy levels and semiconductor capabilities. This review provides an overview on the major achievement and current directions for optimization of performance in the DSSCs based on porphyrins and phthalocyanine. The maximum PCE achieved so far for DSSCs based on porphyrin dyes is 10.16%.