title: Analysis of photovoltage decay transients in dye-sensitized solar cells.
abstract: It is shown that application of the so-called quasi-static approximation greatly simplifies the theoretical treatment of the open circuit photovoltage decay of dye-sensitized nanostructured solar cells (DSCs), since it removes the need to treat the kinetics of trapping and detrapping explicitly and leads to a straightforward analytical solution in the case of an exponential trap distribution. To identify the conditions under which the quasi-static approach is valid, transients calculated using the quasi-static approximation are compared with the results of numerical calculations that treat trapping and detrapping of electrons explicitly. The application of the quasi-static approach to derive the rate constant for the back-reaction of electrons from experimental photovoltage decay data is illustrated for an optimized DSC.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. a.b.walker@bath.ac.uk
authors.forename: Alison B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Walker
authors.forename: L M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Peter
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lobato
authors.forename: P J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Cameron