Improvement of Solar Cell Efficacy by Pulsed External Electric Fields on PSI Protein Arrangement

Solar energy is one of the cleanest energies that are abundant among renewable energy sources. To design a very-low-cost solar device, chlorophyll extracted from spinach was employed. Photosystem I (PSI) was extracted by homogenization of spinach leaves and centrifugation and fractionation by column chromatography. The dipole structure of such natural photodiodes is one of the special features of the PSI protein complex that we tried to align using pulsed external electric fields to improve solar cell efficiency. To align PSI dipoles, several approaches have exploited linkers such as amino acids or polymers. Because of the difficulties of nonpolar or polar biomolecules, here, our approach was to apply a uniform pulsed external electric field (PEEF). With respect to other existing methods, our procedure is a simple, low-cost, and efficient design of solar cells, which leads to improved efficiency of biophotovoltaic cells up to a four-fold increase.