Toward higher energy conversion efficiency for solid polymer electrolyte dye-sensitized solar cells: Ionic conductivity and TiO₂ pore-filling

Even though the solid polymer electrolyte has many intrinsic advantages over the liquid electrolyte, its ionic conductivity and mesopore-filling are much poorer than those of the liquid electrolyte, limiting its practical application to electrochemical devices such as dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). Two major shortcomings associated with utilizing solid polymer electrolytes in DSCs are first discussed, low ionic conductivity and poor pore-filling in mesoporous photoanodes for DSCs. In addition, future directions for the successful utilization of solid polymer electrolytes toward improving the performance of DSCs are proposed. For instance, the facilitated mass-transport concept could be applied to increase the ionic conductivity. Modified biphasic and triple-phasic structures for the photoanode are suggested to take advantage of both the liquid- and solid-state properties of electrolytes.