A review on graphene based solar cells

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the photovoltaic industry has grown rapidly following the improvements in the efficiency and the demand for alternative energy resources. Commercial silicon photovoltaic with a power conversion efficiency of more than 20% plays a dominate role, but the high manufacturing cost is still a major issue for large-scale implementation. Many efforts have been made to reduce the cost of photovoltaic devices. There are huge demands for developing new electrode materials with lower cost and comparable performance. To date Graphene and Graphenederived materials have created an immense research interests due to its extraordinary physical and chemical properties, which delineated Graphene as an outstanding material for future electronics, optics, and energy-harvesting devices. This paper analyzes some of these properties of graphene & investigates whether graphene or graphene based materials can be a potential replacement for conventional materials used in solar cells or not. Graphene is a single atom thick two-dimensional material thus exhibit ~97.7% transmittance during the entire visible light spectrum. Graphene has unusual electronic transfer properties which follows the characteristic of 2D Dirac fermions, quantum hall effects. Electro catalytic actions of grapheme play a key role enhancing the efficiency of electro chemical solar cell like dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSCs), where the liquid/solid interface acts as a pathway for transfer electrons.