Extraction of Five Photovoltaic Parameters of Nature-based Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells using Single Diode Model

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are among the family of third generation photovoltaic (PV). DSSCs are promising with the theoretical predicted value for power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 20%. In this work, explicit equations for the single-diode equivalent circuit model parameters of a solar cell are modeled based on the characteristic points on the I-V curves that do not require the short-circuit and open-circuit slopes as the input data. The equations are used to calculate the five model parameters (n, R-s, R-sh, I-ph, I-o) of a standard solar cell-based DSSC composed of different natural photosensitizers. The results obtained show that four (similar to 28.5%) devices with natural photosensitizers (bitter gourd, sun flower, rose flower, tomato) manifest the parameter irregularities, i.e. they have negative series resistance or complex shunt resistance. Despite the occurrence of irregular parameters, there is still a good match between the calculated and measured photoelectric characteristics. This supports the idea that the nature of the parameter values does not matter provided that there is a good match between the measured and calculated I-V characteristics. The bitter gourd-based DSSC demonstrates the most promising photosensitizer for DSSC fabrication based on the values of the parameters. Hence, the agreement of the calculated and measured parmeters suggests that modeling is a good approach for extraction the solar parameters.