Effect of Ultraviolet Radiation on the Long-Term Stability of Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation has been a significant issue in photovoltaics. It has much stronger energy than visible or infrared ray. In photovoltaics, large energy of UV is useful for the photogeneration, but it is also involved in long-term degradation. In this work, we focused on the effect of UV irradiation on the long-term stability of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). TiO2, which is a good photocatalyst, has the absorption in UV region and TiO(2)excited by UV is possible to deteriorate DSC performance. Five kinds of filters with various filtering ranges were applied for DSCs and their photovoltaic properties were measured in the long-term. UV irradiation initially contributed to the increase in the photogeneration. However, the UV irradiated DSC exhibited earlier start of degradation and more rapid deterioration than other filtered DSCs. Consequently, the unfiltered DSC exhibited 29.7% decrease in comparison with initial performance after 160 h UV irradiation while other filtered DSCs exhibited 13.5% decrease averagely. [GRAPHICS] .