Article

Completely Transparent Conducting Oxide-Free and Flexible Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Fabricated on Plastic Substrates

Photo-Electronic Hybrids Research Center and §Electronic Materials Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Seoul, 136-791, Republic of Korea
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, 120-746, Republic of Korea
Department Chemistry and Nano Science and Department of Science Education, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, 120-750, Republic of Korea
Green School and KU-KIST Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology, Korea University, Seoul, 136-701, Republic of Korea
ACS Nano, 2015, 9 (4), pp 3760–3771
DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5b01346
Publication Date (Web): March 13, 2015
Copyright © 2015 American Chemical Society
*Address correspondence to mjko@kist.re.kr.

Abstract

Abstract Image

To achieve commercialization and widespread application of next-generation photovoltaics, it is important to develop flexible and cost-effective devices. Given this, the elimination of expensive transparent conducting oxides (TCO) and replacement of conventional glass substrates with flexible plastic substrates presents a viable strategy to realize extremely low-cost photovoltaics with a potentially wide applicability. To this end, we report a completely TCO-free and flexible dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) fabricated on a plastic substrate using a unique transfer method and back-contact architecture. By adopting unique transfer techniques, the working and counter electrodes were fabricated by transferring high-temperature-annealed TiO2 and Pt/carbon films, respectively, onto flexible plastic substrates without any exfoliation. The fabricated working electrode with the conventional counter electrode exhibited a record efficiency for flexible DSSCs of 8.10%, despite its TCO-free structure. In addition, the completely TCO-free and flexible DSSC exhibited a remarkable efficiency of 7.27%. Furthermore, by using an organic hole-transporting material (spiro-MeOTAD) with the same transfer method, solid-state flexible TCO-free DSSCs were also successfully fabricated, yielding a promising efficiency of 3.36%.

Additional data and discussion; movies showing the transfer process. This material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.

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Received 17 November 2014
Date accepted 13 March 2015
Published online 13 March 2015
Published in print 28 April 2015
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