South Italy local grapes cultivar as a source of natural sensitizers in Dye-sensitized Solar Cells

We show that anthocyanines extracted from 3 different local cultivar of grapes characteristic of the South Italian region named ''Salento'' can effectively act as nature-friendly and eco-sustainable sensitizers in Dye-sensitized Solar Cells (DSSC) type devices. The natural pigments have been extracted in a simple way by immersing both the whole fruits and the fruit epicarps in methanol and in an ultrasonic bath, without any further purification step. The measured open circuit voltage and the fill factors are among the best values reported in literature. We compare the effectiveness of the extraction process from fermented and from fresh grapes, showing that the devices realized starting from the fresh fruit epicarps perform slightly better than those realized starting from the fermented fruit. We correlate this behavior with an interaction of different dye molecules in the device.