• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Emotion and Sensibility Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.273-276
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• 2009

Photovoltaic-thermal(PVT) collectors are a combination of photovoltaic modules with solar thermal collectors, forming one device that receives solar radiation and produces electricity and heat simultaneously. Of various PV modules, dye-sensitized solar cell(DSC) is a relatively new type of solar cell technology that can transmit light while they can generate electricity. With this aspect, DSC can be applied into solar thermal collectors. The object of this study is to evaluate the thermal performance of PVT collector with DSC. The thermal performance of the DSC PVT combind collector was measured in outdoor conditions with the solar radiation of over $700W/m^2$. In this study, the PVT collector with the 30% light transmittance of DSC achieved its thermal efficiency of about 36%.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.910-914
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• 2007

Recently, a study on the energy conversion efficiency and up sizing' technology of dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) which is focused in considering a new alternative solar cell has been executed. But consideration for the cell characteristics about an internal electronic flow on a large-scaled DSC has not been carried out yet. In this study, we have chosen a solar cell width as a variable of a large-scaled DSCs and confirmed electric characteristics of an individual cell. First, Pt counter electrode surface of DSC is deposited by RF sputtering methode and the electrochemical properties of Pt electrodes was investigated by cyclic -voltammetry. With the Pt electrode, we fabricated DSC samples of different width. As a result, the higher the internal resistance of DSC becomes, the wider the width gets. Internal resistance makes it difficult to collect photoelectron generated from dye. Ultimately up sizing DSC causes the increase of internal resistance and then has a bad effect on the cell characteristics.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.305-308
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• 2007

The field of dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) is being researched actively at present. Because DSC has several advantages to pass the limits of Si solar cells such as a low manufacturing expense, a simple manufacturing process and its transparency. A lot of researches are underway about materials and processes in the field of dye-sensitized solar cell but its structure has been fixed up as the sandwich structure that both edges are used as positive and negative terminals. But the structure as of present is a factor of decreasing efficiency because the more electrons are recombined the further distance from terminal, considering about the characteristic of dye-sensitized solar cell that electrons generated inside cell are moved by diffusion. In this study, we made experiment on expanding the terminal to shorten internal moving distance of electron and compared the results according to the variation of active area to find out the effect of this trial. As a result, we achieved about 15.5% improvement of maximum power and 0.5% improvement of efficiency from terminal-expanded dye-sensitized solar cell of $2cm^{2}$ active area and concluded that the increasing rate of efficiency is raised as the active area becomes wider.

• Current Photovoltaic Research
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.91-96
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• 2015

Optical modeling and characterization of transparent dye-sensitized solar cells (DSC) are presented to design and estimate DSC devices numerically. In order to model the inhomogeneous active layer of DSC, the porous structure of titanium oxide ($TiO_2$) and dye mixture, we prepared films consisting of layer by layer of the DSC's basic materials sequentially, and characterized the optical parameters of the films with the effective refractive index, which was extracted from the transmittance and reflectance measurements in ultra violet to near infra-red range. By using the effective refractive index, we made the optical model for DSC, and demonstrated that the optical model based on effective refractive index can be used to design and evaluate the performance of transparent-type DSC modules.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.124-127
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• 2008

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) have been proposed as a substitute for overcoming the limitation of Si solar cells because DSC has the various applications using advantages of DSC such as low cost, transparency and flexibility. Although some people point out low efficiency of DSC as the important problem at present, general views say that actually cumulative power is not insufficient as compared with Si solar cell. Therefore, we analyzed the characteristics of both cells according to the change of incident angle in this study. The insensibility about the incident angle has more developable time. Finally, DSC is able to fill a shortage of power caused from low efficiency of DSC for same time by developing during impossible time to develop in Si solar cell. As a result, DSC has 75% and 210% cumulative power of Si solar cell in summer and winter under the standard sunshine duration.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.357-362
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• 2005

The tandem solar cell composed of a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) and a thermoelectric generator (TEG) was designed. In such new cell, the characteristics of DSC and TEG were investigated. DSC uses the wavelength range of 380∼750 nm and has the maximum efficiency of below 10 ％. If the solar light transmitted through DSC can be converted to heat energy, TEG can generate electric energy using this heat energy. By this means, it is possible to utilize most of solar energy in the wavelength range of 350∼3000 nm for electric generation and it can be expected to obtain higher solar energy conversion efficiency exceeding the known limit of maximum efficiency. For this purpose we suggest the tandem solar cell constructed with DSC and TEG. In this structure, DSC has a carbon nanotube film as a counter electrode of DSC in order to collect the solar light and convert it to heat energy. We measured the I-V characteristics of DSC and TEG, assembled to the tandem cell. As a result, it was shown that DSC with carbon nanotube and TEG had the efficiency of 9.1 ％ and 6.2 ％, respectively. From this results, it is expected that the tandem solar cell of the new design has the possibility of enhanced conversion efficiency to exceed above 15 ％.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.123-127
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• 2007

Up sizing of dye-sensitized solar cell(DSC) is the important technology to bring about commercialization of DSC. Several studies to obtain a stable large area DSC have been investigated in overseas laboratories, but have been hardly done in our country. In this study, up sizing technology of dye sensitized solar cells(DSCs) was investigated. We investigated low dark current materials for the current collecting grid. From the result, a new DSC module with metal grid was designed, and fabricated. For a new interconnection, both working and counter electrodes are alternately coupled on 10[cm]$\times$7[cm] substrate. We have achieved 68% of fill factor and photoelectric conversion efficiency of around 2.6% as the best results of new designed DSC structure.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.484.2-484.2
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• 2014

There are many efforts to improving the power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). Although DSCs have a low production cost, their low PCE and low thermal stability have limited commercial applications. This study describes the preparation of a novel multifunctional polymer gel electrolyte in which a cross-linking polymerization reaction is used to encapsulate $TiO_2$ nanoparticles toward improving the power conversion efficiency and long-term stability of a quasi-solid state DSC. A series of liquid junction dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) was fabricated based on polymer membrane encapsulated dye-sensitized $TiO_2$ nanoparticles, prepared using a surface-induced cross-linking polymerization reaction, to investigate the dependence of the solar cell performance on the encapsulating membrane layer thickness. The ion conductivity decreased as the membrane thickness increased; however, the long term-stability of the devices improved with increasing membrane thickness. Nanoparticles encapsulated in a thick membrane (ca. 37 nm), obtained using a 90 min polymerization time, exhibited excellent pore filling among $TiO_2$ particles. This nanoparticle layer was used to fabricate a thin-layered, quasi-solid state DSC. The thick membrane prevented short-circuit paths from forming between the counter and the $TiO_2$ electrode, thereby reducing the minimum necessary electrode separation distance. The quasi-solid state DSC yielded a high power conversion efficiency (7.6/8.1%) and excellent stability during heating at $65^{\circ}C$ over 30 days. These performance characteristics were superior to those obtained from a conventional DSC (7.5/3.5%) prepared using a $TiO_2$ active layer with the same thickness. The reduced electrode separation distance shortened the charge transport pathways, which compensated for the reduced ion conductivity in the polymer gel electrolyte. Excellent pore filling on the $TiO_2$ particles minimized the exposure of the dye to the liquid and reduced dye detachment.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.251-256
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• 2006

To design the effective usage of electric double layer capacitors (EDLCs) used for a storage device of dye sensitized solar cell (DSC) energy, we first investigated the accumulation state of electrical charges and the charge behavior in the EDLCs. Based on the results, the voltage characteristics of EDLCs connected to DSC energy were evaluated. The results showed that the charge accumulation region concentrated on the central part of the carbonaceous electrode in EDLCs and the required times for charging and discharging were almost the same.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.673-676
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• 2005

To design the effective usage of electric double layer capacitors (EDLCs) used for a storage device of dye sensitized solar cell(DSC) energy, we first investigated the accumulation state of electrical charges and the charge behavior in the EDLCs. Based on the results. the voltage characteristics of EDLCs connected to DSC energy were evaluated. The results showed that the charge accumulation region concentrated on central part of the carbonaceous electrode in EDLCs and the required times for charging and discharging were almost the same.