A Study of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells under Indoor and Low Level Outdoor Lighting: Comparison to Organic and Inorganic Thin Film Solar Cells and Methods to Address Maximum Power Point Tracking

With increasing applications in consumer electronics such as smart phones, laptops and tablet PCs, the need for pervasive computing with a requirement of lower power consumption is increasing every day, This opens the door for energy harvesting that could charge the batteries in these devices to keep them continually functioning in some useful state. There has been a lot of attention on flexible thin film solar cells, such as dye sensitized (DSSC), organic and inorganic, given their low cost and improving efficiency. Such cells are suitable for these applications both under outdoor and indoor conditions due to their larger spectral response. Understanding the behavior of solar cells such as DSSC under indoor light conditions along with power management algorithms to extract maximize the collected energy is vital for consumer electronics applications. This analysis is compared to organic and inorganic thin film solar cells.