Progress in Producing Large Area Flexible Dye Sensitized Solar Cells

Dye sensitized nanocrystalline TiO 2 solar cells have been reported with over 11% efficiency and are extremely promising as very low cost and lightweight photovoltaic sources. However, most reports are for cells of low area fabricated on glass, which withstands processing temperatures of ∼450°C. In this paper, we describe the fabrication and performance of cells made on flexible ITO-coated polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates with 6” × 3” dimensions. To improve the efficiency in the cells, we enhanced the ITO current collection efficiency with metallization fingers. The fingers resulted in a >10 fold increase in short-circuit current under normal solar illumination compared to cells without metallization. Further improvements were realized by passivating the metallization fingers at the metal/polymer electrolyte interface.