Fabrication and characterization of dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) for wearable energy harvesting applications

Abstract

This thesis presents the novel use of printing and coating techniques to fabricate liquid and solid-state dye sensitised solar cell (DSSC) on textiles for wearable energy harvesting applications. E-textiles have attracted increasing research interest, and a persistent challenge remains the supply of electrical power. Solar energy is one of the most abundant renewable energy sources, which has an efficient solution to power the wearable electronics by commercially available photovoltaic devices such as solar watch or solar backpack. DSSC have emerged into the PV market demonstrating efficiencies of 11.9%, and offering a relatively low cost of manufacturing, compared to conventional silicon based solar cells. However, the conventional DSSC consists of two rigid glass substrates, which is incompatible with e-textile applications. In order to fabricate the DSSC on a textile substrate, a set of temperature varying functional material formulations have been investigated. This research presents a systematic investigation into the formulation of titanium dioxide suitable for low temperature process. Low temperature processed DSSCs were fabricated onto FTO glass substrates at 150 oC and achieved a maximum PCE of 4.3%. The materials and process were used to replace both the FTO coated glass substrates with a flexible interface coated polyester cotton textile and an ITO coated PET substrate all fabricated at 150 oC. This DSSC approach achieved a maximum PCE of 4.04%. However, at this stage the flexible textile DSSCs still required the ITO coated PET film. In order to achieve a fully solution processed flexible DSSCs on purely textile substrates, solidstate DSSCs were achieved with customised solid-state electrolyte formulation. Since the TiO2 compact layer requires 450 oC for crystallisation, a glass fibre textile is used. This required a polyimide layer as a temperature resistant interface layer. The glass fibre textile ssDSSC achieved a max PCE of 0.4%.

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ORCID for Stephen Beeby: orcid.org/0000-0002-0800-1759

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