Flexible Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Although the highest energy conversion efficiency about 11% of dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) based on the transparent oxide conductive glass (TCO) has been obtained, the heavy, rigid, and expensive TCO substrate need to be substituted with flexible materials such as plastic or metal substrates in order to decrease the production costs and enlarge the application range The key problem with plastic substrates is their low temperature tolerance, so some novel fabricating methods need to be developed to enhance the quality of flexible photo electrodes Whereas with metal substrates, the above problem is not existed due to the high temperature tolerance of them,while a few kinds of metals such as stainless steel, titanium are suitable for substrates owing to the corrosion of iodine-containing electrolyte typically used in DSSC The key problem for fabricating flexible DSSC with metal substrate photo electrodes is to fabricate the high transparent counter electrodes and use some kinds of low light absorption electrolytes Taking these accounts in mind,researchers have obtained some significant progress Another important research challenge on flexible DSSC is to improve the long-term stability of the cells to suit for consumer applications Some kinds of quasi or all solid state electrolytes have been used in TCO based DSSC and show excellent long-term stability, if they can be transferred to the flexible DSSC successfully, the problem can be solved