As a project for Engineering 103 Design Lab we are a team experimenting to optimize dye-sensitized solar cells. Solar cells are commonly seen in solar panels to the everyday person. As research continues in making the individual cells of solar panels more efficient there is a constant struggle between energy efficiency and the cost of producing the solar cell. As a team, over the course of 10 weeks we will be researching different dyes(key component of solar cell) and choosing 1 with a higher efficiency than cells commonly used today that do not have optimal efficiency. Organic berry dyes have been thoroughly researched already. Therefore we will be making berry cells and using them as a baseline when comparing berry dyes and chemical dyes.
It is a general consensus that as a planet we demand an extremely high amount of energy supply. We are currently using dirty fossil fuels as our main source for electricity, which consequently has extremely negative affects for the planet and human health. In present time there is not a prominent amount of importance directed towards making solar energy the main source of electricity for the world. However, as students currently learning that with enough research and experimentation, it is possible to make solar energy efficient enough to supply the world demand. Through using dye sensitized solar cells, with the right combination of dye and method of manufacturing the cell this will be possible.
Therefore, we as a group will pick one dye to experiment with that are within our cost range, contact companies that manufacture these dyes, and get a small sample of them to use for testing in our lab. After making solar cells with different dyes and testing different processes of making the cells we will test their energy efficiencies and compare them to the current progress of solar cell efficiencies that have already been done by other scientists. The goal is that in this project we will come to a conclusion to continue progress in making solar cells a way to supply the worlds energy demand.
