High performance dye-sensitized solar cells with alkylpyridinium iodide salts in electrolytes

Pyridinium iodide salts, which are competitive to the conventional imidazolium iodide salts, have been used for dye-sensitized solar cells as iodide sources and ionic conductivities. Pyridinium iodide series are easy to prepare and less expensive than the imidazolium series salts. In this research, quite comparable efficiencies were obtained from electrolytes with pyridinium iodide salts. For the experiments, pyridinium salts with a few different alkyl chains are applied. When a pyridinium head is modified to picolinium, which has a methyl group on the pyridinium head, a noticeable V_oc drop has been observed. However, the length of the alkyl chains on the pyridinium head does not affect V_oc effectively. The oddnumbered alkyl chains showed slightly lower V_oc compared to that of the even-numbered alkyl chains. Finally, the performances of the cells with pyridinium salts are compared to those of the conventional cells with imidazolium salts.